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I am honoured and privileged to list on my profile that I have been an advisor to the White House, World Bank, World Economic Forum and United Nations. Now I can add TEDx Speaker. I was invited to TEDx Athens this year and delivered a short (15 minute) keynote which is now live on the…

I received a long and lengthy article last week from Taylor Ryan, CMO at Valuer.ai (tryan@valuer.ai). The link provides a comprehensive article on European FinTech developments. It’s so good that I am happy to share it with y’all. Enjoy.   THE BEST FINTECH STARTUPS IN EUROPE Government support for the financial sector and financial technology (fintech)…

The main blog headlines are … Eyes wide open I sat through a soul-destroying meeting the other day. The meeting was with a C-level decision maker in a bank, and we were brainstorming. Ideas were flowing and, at the end of the ideation process, we went to see the C-level person to get his ……

There’s a regular itch that I feel in the back of my neck. I scratch it, but it won’t go away. The itch is an alarm call really, and it’s asking whether all this FinTech investment is worth it. Last year, $111.8 billion was invested in over 12,000 start-up FinTech firms worldwide, according to KPMG….

The big news yesterday is that Klarna is now Europe’s largest FinTech unicorn, valued at $5.5 billion, and the sixth largest FinTech unicorn worldwide (discounting Ant Financial, Ping An and co). According to CB Insights, Stripe is the largest FinTech unicorn (USA, $22.5 billion), followed by One97 Communications (PayTM India, $10 billion); Nubank (Brazil, $10…

It’s the holiday season, so my wife dragged me off to Disneyland with the children. It was a great experience but, halfway through, I saw this t-shirt: “It was all started by a mouse” Now it wasn’t. It was started by Walt and his brother who became a formidable team. Walt, the visionary, and his…

Over a decade ago, I curated a book about MiFID – the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive. I don’t blog about this much these days, as my audience is firmly in the retail and payments technology space, but I still keep close track of the investment markets, clearing and settlement, custodial banks and central counterparty…

I sat through a soul-destroying meeting the other day. The meeting was with a C-level decision maker in a bank, and we were brainstorming. Ideas were flowing and, at the end of the ideation process, we went to see the C-level person to get his view. It wasn’t good. You can’t do that because the…

I was asked the other day about my worst prediction ever made. My answer may surprise some, but it was the view that intermediaries would disappear as technology takes over. I made that prediction about independent financial advisors back in the 1990s as call centres appeared. It didn’t come true. Since I made that prediction,…

There are always questions about the future. It’s the only thing we don’t know. We don’t know what will happen in the future, so we ask lots of questions. What will happen when Amazon opens a bank? Will regulators create new rules about data sharing? How will quantum computing change the game? Is distributed ledgers…