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After talking about an intelligent bank yesterday, I found a huge challenge with a dumb bank today. It started because I just got a charge for a renewal of a subscription that I didn’t know I had. The charge was made from my AMEX card via PayPal, so I launched questions with both. PayPal was…

I keep thinking about what an Intelligent Bank means. What is an Intelligent Bank? Well, strip it back to basics. An Intelligent Bank is a bank that is so embedded and intimate with my digital finance that it can predict what I should do, could do and can do next. It knows when I’m being…

I’ve talked for some time about bot-to-bot payments in the Agentic AI world. The idea is that you won’t have to think as money thinks for you, and payments will transfer automatically without intervention. Moving this forward is a recent announcement from Google, which has developed the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework that enables agents…

This week’s main discussions include … Why bankers hate changing core systems It is rare that bank mergers work due to IT systems. Lloyds has historically taken the approach of not bothering to migrate them; TSB, after leaving the Lloyds family, migrated to a Sabadell system and it cost them millions; Santander believes all acquired banks…

It is rare that bank mergers work due to IT systems. Lloyds has historically taken the approach of not bothering to migrate them; TSB, after leaving the Lloyds family, migrated to a Sabadell system and it cost them millions; Santander believes all acquired banks work on their Parthenon core system, although that has now been replaced…

Building on yesterday’s blog about Project Nemo, it’s worth mentioning the Purple Pound. Every year, Britain celebrates Purple Tuesday – in case you missed it, it was last week – and it is all about recognising the massive community in all countries who are financially challenged. 78% of people who have disabilities find it difficult to…

I cannot believe I haven’t blogged about Project Nemo before, but here we go. My good friend Joanne Dewar, former CEO of GPS – the payments powerhouse behind most fintechs – created the Project two years ago when she found many people with challenges being excluded from financial services. Now, two years later, it’s just…

My friend Rik Coeckelbergs wrote an interesting update about a speech by  Paul Maskall, Strategic Fraud Prevention and Behavioural Lead, UK Finance, at the Open Banking Expo. He specifically noted a question Paul asked the audience: “What’s the difference between fraud and marketing?” and thought that the only difference “lies in the endgame: whether the purpose…

Things we’re reading today include: Bank of England backs down on crypto after Trump lobbying Proposed regulatory regime for sterling-denominated systemic stablecoins | Bank of England UBS delays migration of some super-rich Credit Suisse clients, sources say China’s Ant International Eyes Fintech In Saudi Arabia Cryptoqueen who fled China for London mansion to be sentenced…

I just picked up this report by Finextra and ACI Worldwide on Payments in the year 2030. The research surveyed over 160 people in C-level financial roles around the world and found that most of them are still thinking about how to move to cloud-based solutions; still grappling with how to do real-time payments; still…