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Sylvester Stallone was broke. He couldn’t pay his bills. All he had was a screenplay called Rocky. Studios wanted the script but not Stallone. They were happy to buy his idea, provided somebody else played the lead. He refused. It was an extraordinary gamble. Selling the script would have solved his immediate problems. Instead, he…

The Bank of England has released its latest report on artificial intelligence in financial services. The numbers are impressive. The reality is less so. Banks are embracing AI at extraordinary speed, but are they transforming banking or just making yesterday’s banking cheaper? The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have just published their latest…

It is Halloween week and, by coincidence, the same week as the Chancellor’s Budget which is announced tomorrow. I say by coincidence as it seems likely that the Chancellor wants to drink the banker’s blood by restoring higher taxes upon them. There has been a huge debate over increasing taxes on British banks. The contest…

I found myself wondering the other day why almost everything seems to end in .99. Books cost 9.99. Electrical goods are 99.99. Cars are advertised at 19,999. Even software subscriptions seem incapable of charging a clean 10 or 100. One penny appears to have become one of the most valuable numbers in commerce. Most people…

This week’s main blog discussions include … I can see clearly now the clouds have gone When Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and…

As Halloween approaches, I was reflecting on death and murder in banking. It is not a new thing for me, as it turns up quite often, but it hit me today with allegations that a former bank chairman arranged for his communications chief to be intimidated, in an operation that ended in his death. People…

We gave them our data, our money, our businesses and now our intelligence. In return, they gave us convenience. Nobody asked who would end up controlling the world. I have been thinking a lot about the Google Cloud outage this week and the fact that a power failure in a London data centre disrupted banking…

When Google Goes Down, Your Bank Goes Down. Who Is Really in Control? We spent decades worrying about banks being too big to fail. Now we have a handful of technology companies that are too important to fail, and yesterday demonstrated why that should terrify us. I’ve recently been blogging and writing about the dangers…

I’ve been a little bit prolific in writing this year, what with two books in Pulp Finction and Intelligent Bank consistently in the top 10 on Amazon. Now, I have one more new book. It started with a question in my head: how come Pharaohs had so much power? It ended with the colonisation of Mars. The new book Who…

You have to laugh. The police spend their lives chasing criminals and now the criminals are stealing their identities to sell cryptocurrency. You really couldn’t make it up. The latest example comes from Ireland, where the Gardaí, the Irish police, have apparently discovered that their social media accounts are rather less secure than the criminals…