Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

The lakes, ponds, streams and brooks of finance

Jack Ma had a rant about the financial system ahead of Ant Group’s IPO. As reported in The Financial Times, he thinks the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) who issue the Basel Accords is like “an old people’s club” … “The Basel Accords are like an old people’s club . . . we can’t use yesterday’s methods to regulate the…

Europe’s flagship payments system died for 11 hours

Over a decade ago, I curated a book about Europe’s Singe Euro Payments Area (SEPA). I was quite boring ten years ago, before FinTech made me cool. However, I still watch SEPA, the PSD regs, MiFID and more. I’m still a bit boring underneath it all. I don’t blog about it, because the audience for…

The difference between cloud-based and cloud-native

I am having a debate on a regular basis about being cloud-native and digital at the core versus cloud-based and adding digital. The two are very different. Most big banks are moving to be cloud-based and adding digital, but that is not digital at the core and cloud-native. The latter has a business model born…

The Finanser’s Week: 19th October 2020 – 25th October 2020

The main blog discussions this week include … It’s all about supply and demand … and right now everyone is demanding from home My father was a teacher. His expertise focused upon economics. Does it show? I am an economics fan, and studied consumer economics as a specialist subject as part of my university course….

Forget the MoJo and get the GloLo (the Elephant returns)

I went back and talked to the elephant. The elephant in the room. The elephant I hadn’t noticed until, one morning, he was there. The elephant that says he’s the economy. Me: Hello again, how are you? The Elephant: Not great, how are you? Me: Not bad. Why are you not great? The Elephant: Ah….

2020 is K-shaped

Everyone was talking about a V-shaped recovery in March 2020. Then it went onto a dialogue about whether it might be U-shaped or even W-shaped. Now, some economists are talking about a K-shaped economy. Some say this is all about the haves and have nots – the upper half are those with investments, equities and stocks…

Demanding from home means stores are dead?

One thing that is clear about demand and supply is, when you think about where we are today, there is little demand for anything. We are all staying at home – and so the only demand is what can be delivered to the home – that’s the issue. This came home to me when I…

Reasons to be cheerful, blockheads

I wrote my blog the other day with the title Why I’m fed up with blockchain. It amused me to see how much backlash it created, particularly on LinkedIn where there are over sixty comments as of today. In fact one guy called Ajit even wrote a blog about my blog. It didn’t surprise me,…

The Finanser’s Week: 12th October 2020 – 18th October 2020

The main blog discussions this week include … Will DeFi destroy banking? It has been a while since I sat back to think about the future bank. I talk about the future bank all the time, but the overall view of a bank in its totality. What will it look like in 2030 and beyond?…