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The other day, UK police raided a property where they found £114 million ($150 million) of cryptocurrency. The raid was part of an AML investigation, but I was particularly struck by this comment from Deputy Assistant Commissioner (DAC) Graham McNulty “There is an inherent link between money and violence.” Of course, that’s obvious. You only…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Why did HSBC dump their biggest corporate client? Talking about HSBC often drags me into political controversy. For example, when I criticised the bank for not making a stand over the Hong Kong protests, I got a lot of pushback. Frankly, I don’t like to dip my feet into…

Just received Findexable’s annual report on FinTech hubs and developments, which finds San Francisco, London and New York as the key FinTech hubs of the world. Behind those cities, Montevideo (Uruguay), Hangzhou (China) and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) are making great gains. What’s going on? Here’s the outline in the intro to the second edition of…

After talking about Tribe One, the Digital Gang, yesterday, who use words like: Autonomous, intelligent and connected Democratised, distributed and decentralised Platform, ecosystem and open Reliable, resilient and robust Vulnerable, questionable and fragile Environmental, sustainable and renewable I’m moving on to Tribe Two today: the Analogue Gang. These guys are all about face-to-face, over-the-table, eyeballing…

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits that should be in there,…

After blogging about involvement in USA/China dynamics yesterday, I thought it pertinent to share a timeline of activities today that place context around the whole case. I could add more, but don’t want to bore you …   2007.2: Huaying (Huawei) bought Skycom. Ms. Meng was the Corporate Secretary of Huaying.   2007.11: Huaying sold Skycom…

Talking about HSBC often drags me into political controversy. For example, when I criticised the bank for not making a stand over the Hong Kong protests, I got a lot of pushback. Frankly, I don’t like to dip my feet into political waters unless forced to and, in the spirit of that thinking, I was prompted…

This week’s main blog discussions include … If you think Open Banking is where it’s at, think again As someone who has set up a number of small businesses, there are three major tasks that I hate: Doing the accounts Tax returns Invoices As the business owner, all I want to do is my job,…

I love the Darwin Awards. For those who are unfamiliar – is anyone not aware of these awards? – they are given to those who remove themselves from the gene pool in the funniest or stupidest manner. My faves include the guy who launched himself in a chair attached to a host of helium balloons,…

Money 2020 has just dropped an interesting report talking about FinTech 2.0 (although I’m already on FinTech 5.0). In fact 2.0 is a pretty old idea, as outlined in this blog from June 2016, so I think the context of the report is a bit off but the content is pretty good. Here’s the Executive…