Grid

2025 has been the year of AI and AI hype from Agentic AI to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to Robots, chatbots and more but, for me, it has been the year of Deep Fake AI. It all started with the story of the French woman who got duped into a fake AI relationship with Brad Pitt…

You may know Wells Fargo, one of the largest American banks. I know them well, having worked with some of their key people over the years. Their brand is all based around the old Pony Express … Note: stamp is dated 1940 … but you may not know their real history, so here we go….

I was having an interesting debate the other day about how AI will impact banking longer-term. The most interesting angle was that AI will provide knowledge and blockchain (or distributed ledgers, if you prefer) will provide provenance, and that the two combined are a killer partnership. Thinking about it, this gets interesting. So AI can…

This week’s main discussions include … Little Britain: “A rainy island with a hostile tax system is a hard sell” Many years ago, I was presenting to a country suffering sanctions. No longer able to access the SWIFT network and pretty much excommunicated by most banks worldwide, they were suffering. Of course, they could do…

I spotted a quote this week: “All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer My mind immediately moved to bitcoin and cryptocurrency and, specifically, Jamie Dimon. For years, Dimon has said that bitcoin is a scam and yet, now,…

Many years ago, I was presenting to a country suffering sanctions. No longer able to access the SWIFT network and pretty much excommunicated by most banks worldwide, they were suffering. Of course, they could do nested accounts, where you bury your bank in a pyramid of other banks, but that is pretty complicated, so I…

Jamie Dimon, the chap that runs JPMorgan, has just stirred up a big debate about debanking by accusing Trump Media, the folks that run Donald’s Truth Social platform, of ‘making up things’. What things are they making up? That they’ve been debanked by JPMorgan for their political affiliation. The thing is that Jamie then poked…

Being raised on an independent island, I learned lots about British history. For my GCSE’s, it was all about learning Henry VIII’s story of leaving the Holy Empire of Rome to marry Anne Boleyn and the story of the first and second World Wars. We knew nothing about Europe, let alone the rest of the…

At Money2020 Amsterdam I met Airwallex, a company that has risen rapidly from nowhere to the top of the heap. I was a bit embarrassed not to know much about them but, in 2018, Stripe offered $1.2 billion to acquire Airwallex. At the time, their revenues were just $2 million. Stripe’s Patrick Collison negotiated directly and…

This week’s main discussions include … Spacecoin: a currency for astronauts? I just got an invite to invest in Spacecoin. What is that? SPACECOIN is a visionary cryptocurrency built for the space economy and designed to offer a decentralized, efficient, and secure platform for interplanetary trade investors and exploration. WTH? What’s the next tech revolution?…