Emmanuel Macron faced protesters across France during the weekend, in a country where he has been dubbed The President of the Rich. What interests me is that title. The President of the Rich. Are not all governments, the governments of the rich? Isn’t that why we have the 99% for, as the rich get richer,…
The 11th of November. 11 November. 11/11. Not 9/11 or 5/11. 11/11. For Europeans and Americans, 11/11 means the end of the First World War. The Allies sat down and signed the Armistice Agreement with the Germans at 11:00 (Paris time) on 11th November, 1918, in Compiègne and ended the War. Poland reappeared as a…
The main blog headlines are … Will Ripple replace SWIFT? It’s a big week of FinTech in Asia with Money 2020 China and the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) all taking place in the same week. One of the headlines emerging from SFF was an interview with Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple. The headline is from…
It’s a big week of FinTech in Asia with Money 2020 China and the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) all taking place in the same week. One of the headlines emerging from SFF was an interview with Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple. The headline is from a Bloomberg interview and reads: Ripple Is Aiming to Overtake…
Twenty years ago, I worked on a strategy for the future of banking. My conclusion was that banks would merge with telecommunications firms and become hybrid institutions. Twenty years later, it hasn’t happened. But will it? It was interesting because way back then I worked for NCR which was owned by AT&T. AT&T, a telecommunications…
I often find myself in weird or frustrating situations that I don’t know how to break. For example, dealing with clients who require a Government Tax Residency Letter and multiple hurdles to be cleared before they can make payment; or dealing with American clients who want to pay me by cheque; or, worst of all, American clients who require…
At the conference I attended the other day, one speaker highlighted some InsurTech I’d not seen before but thought pretty cool. It’s a prototype service from Direct Line called Fleetlights. Fleetlights is an army of drones that light up the night skies and are designed to help people in difficult conditions, such as in a…
The main blog headlines are … Teach children the things that machines cannot learn I often talk about teaching children to learn what machines cannot learn. Our system of education was created in the Industrial Revolution, and is based upon kids being stuffed with facts, stats and dates. They learn to parrot-fashion repeat things, and…
I often talk about teaching children to learn what machines cannot learn. Our system of education was created in the Industrial Revolution, and is based upon kids being stuffed with facts, stats and dates. They learn to parrot-fashion repeat things, and are tested to see if they can remember. It’s a very poor state of…
