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I was at a large bank’s wealth management conference recently, where the CEO was being quizzed about various areas including a lot about technology and FinTech. He made several statements that I noted with interest: “Roboadvisory services improves our speed-to-market and human productivity, but does not replace humans. In particular, I can see that artificial…

It’s been an interesting few weeks, watching bitcoin’s rollercoaster ride as it rises to valuations over $4,000 and then dives to almost $2,000 before rising again to near $6,000. This is for an asset that just a year ago you could have purchased for a few hundred dollars. The rise of cryptocurrency valuations is confusing…

I finally finished writing my new book. I’m not going to say too much about it, as it now has to go through a lengthy editing cycle and will be released next year. A key theme in the new book is financial inclusion and, to those ends, I made a visit to Hangzhou, China, to meet…

I recently stumbled across a marketing campaign being run by UBS, which tries to answer the hardest questions in the world. The questions cover everything from equality to politics and, to illustrate what they are debating, here are a few examples: Why is there such a big gap between the richest and the poorest? (UBS is…

The top blog posts of the last fortnight include … The next ten years of technology from Gartner and Skinner I just spotted that Gartner have made a series of ten bold predictions for IT 2018 and beyond. They are summarised nicely by Forbes and are: By 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites…

I’ve blogged on some of the themes I’m going to cover below, but the story gets clearer and clearer in my head the more I blog about and talk about it, so this version may be a little clearer than some that have gone before. The first is that banks organisational structures have to move…

I find it interesting as we move towards Open Banking and Open APIs through regulations at both the UK and EU levels. The push is for data sharing with trusted third parties with user consent. All well and good, you would think, but several surveys point to it not being quite so rosy. The typical…

I blogged about the FinTech themes that came out of the Celero conference the other day and forgot to mention that I recently joined a one-day retreat at Payments International in London, as a facilitator. I don’t do such intimate work very often, where I sit with a few people and jaw-jaw, but this was…

This quote If you’re getting something for free, you are the product has been floating around for a while, and normally is related to Facebook and Google. It’s all about the fact that these companies are selling you to advertisers as clickbait. Facebook, Google, Twitter and others are not free at all. You just think…

Following on from talking around the big ten tech themes last Friday, I thought I would follow up with five FinTech themes for right now.  This came out of a keynote speech I gave at Celero’s 9th annual technology conference in Canada last week. It was fun with the CEO, Bob Reczka, kicking off the whole…