I was asked the other day about my worst prediction ever made. My answer may surprise some, but it was the view that intermediaries would disappear as technology takes over. I made that prediction about independent financial advisors back in the 1990s as call centres appeared. It didn’t come true. Since I made that prediction,…
There are always questions about the future. It’s the only thing we don’t know. We don’t know what will happen in the future, so we ask lots of questions. What will happen when Amazon opens a bank? Will regulators create new rules about data sharing? How will quantum computing change the game? Is distributed ledgers…
As banks embrace digital transformation, there is a high level of discomfort amongst bank staff around the change. First, they hear almost every day that artificial intelligence and machine learning will automate their jobs. They fear the future. They fear losing their job. How can you reassure them that they can participate in the change…
I have this debate often: Why governments will fail to block the emergence of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin Can you have decentralised exchange without centralised control? Is the world being democratised through technology? How do governments regulate a networked world? A world without money A world without government? … and find the answer always the…
I wrote a couple of recent blogs about the issue with finding good developers and attracting them to banks. The first, about the war for talent, made the statement: the main motivation of developers joining a firm is to solve interesting problems. The second, titled When code is art, how do you attract great artists?, talked…
The main blog headlines are … How to make a small island a big centre for FinTech One of the discussions at the UN meetings was around SIDS, the Small Island Developing States. I didn’t know much about SIDS but, when investigating further, discovered I did. They range from islands like Belize and Puerto Rico…
No, I’m not talking about Francis Rossi but the issue of how to achieve sustainability. This came up during a lunch, where my lunch colleague had picked up on my discussions of sustainable finance, and started to debate how we could change things. The issue we agreed is with governments, but government focus upon votes,…
Talking of Long Finance (see last week’s updates on sustainable finance), there’s some really interesting publications from the group that runs this program, in partnership with the Financial Services Club. This builds on the work of the Long Now. I wrote a long blog about The Long Now almost a decade ago, and haven’t updated much since….
