Shaping the future of finance
I was playing around with some numbers the other day, comparing the world’s biggest banks with the world’s biggest fintech firms, when something struck me. We keep comparing them using all the obvious measures: customers, revenues, profits, assets and market capitalisation. Who’s bigger? Who’s growing faster? Are the fintechs really disrupting the banks or are…
There is something wonderfully contradictory happening in banking right now illustrated by the main news headlines I picked out yesterday. Banks are racing to put artificial intelligence into the heart of their operations because it makes them faster, cheaper and more productive, while at the same time warning their customers that artificial intelligence creates new…
I asked AI to summarise the latest edition of Huawei’s financial magazine called Transform, and this is what it came back with. I think AI is not objective … Transform Issue 27: Banking’s Butterfly Moment The most striking contribution in Huawei’s Transform Issue 27 comes from Chris Skinner, who argues that banking is moving beyond…
MasterCard just produced an interesting range of views about the future of shopping and money using visionaries like my friend Theo Lau, who alerted me to the report. Download the report here. A quick summary. We have spent the last years talking about artificial intelligence as though the big change is that we will have…
Apparently, artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. Well, maybe, because this is no longer just a warning coming from science-fiction writers or people standing outside Silicon Valley carrying placards. Some of the people building the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems are openly discussing the possibility that the technology they are creating could…
Ten years ago, Britain voted to leave the European Union and, looking back at the extraordinary arguments surrounding that decision, it is worth asking a straightforward question: was Brexit worth it? I remember the arguments well. We were going to take back control of our borders, our laws and our money, while Britain would emerge…
This week’s main blog discussions include … What the FinTech Book Club thinks of “Intelligent Bank” The FinTech Book Club recently devoted its discussion to my latest book Intelligent Bank, and the overall reaction was strongly positive. That was a relief as I’m a good friend of these guys, but that does not make them…
The FinTech Book Club recently devoted its discussion to my latest book Intelligent Bank, and the overall reaction was strongly positive. That was a relief as I’m a good friend of these guys, but that does not make them biased. All views are their own and independent and objective. The reviewers are leading fintech experts…
Digital money doesn’t have a passport. For millenia, money has been organised around geography. The dollar belongs to America, sterling to Britain, the euro to Europe and the yen to Japan. Banks are licensed nationally, central banks provide national monetary anchors, governments guarantee deposits nationally and regulators supervise institutions largely through national legal frameworks. Digital…
