Grid

I recently was invited to be the keynote at some innovation awards in Ireland. It got me thinking about what innovation means in finance, so here are the notes from my speech. I trust it’s useful …   Thank you for inviting me here to join you here for the first Innovation Awards in Dublin….

I just got into a debate with a friend about the future of the world. Dangerous to get into a debate with a futurist, but hey, I upset her. My premise is that the world is globalising and will continue to do so. Brexit, Trump, trade wars, Syria, Yemen and other current affairs are all…

I had a few people haul me up over my critique of Nicholas Megaw’s article in the FT last week, including Nicholas himself. I realised post the post that the issue is definitions. In general, the term challenger banks has become accepted to be used in FinTech circles as banks that are challenging traditional banks…

It’s been interesting to watch the development of Facebook’s Libra project. As I expected, regulators hate it and are asking lots of questions about it. Most seem to want to ban it. And now PayPal has dropped out of the original founding team, with Visa and MasterCard rumoured to follow. What’s also been interesting is…

The main blog headlines are … Banks are product not customer focused I walked into a grocer’s store the other day. The store was resplendent with fruits of all colours and continents. There were red, yellow and green peppers; carrots, courgettes and cauliflowers; oranges, apples and bananas of both large and small; watermelons, honey melons…

In case you missed it 11FS, as well as doing podcasts, have made a movie. The movie is all about the 11 years since the financial crisis hit and how the conditions led to the rise of FinTech and, specifically, UK FinTech. It’s an hour long, so set aside some time today with a nice…

I walked into a grocer’s store the other day. The store was resplendent with fruits of all colours and continents. There were red, yellow and green peppers; carrots, courgettes and cauliflowers; oranges, apples and bananas of both large and small; watermelons, honey melons and mangoes; green grapes, red grapes and grapefruits; and more and more…

I don’t get The Financial Times editorials these days. Last month, they published a ridiculous article about challenger banks eating the banker’s lunch – which I covered here as being the crumbs off the table of the banker’s lunch – and this month, they publish a totally contrary view that the large banks have steamrollered over…

I’ve heard many ex-bankers who joined a FinTech start-up, challenger bank or similar, say that they’ve achieved more in the past year than in the past decade. They claim to have achieved more with £1 million than they would have achieved before with £100 million in a bank. They’ve developed more with a team of…

Being conference season, there were many announcements in the past week about headlines companies wanted to gain with their innovations. One of the main headline grabbers for me came from R3. These included: Mastercard partners R3 … R3 and Infosys complete blockchain trade finance trial Wells Fargo’s Stablecoin ‘Faster, Cheaper’ Than SWIFT … Bank of America Joins…