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I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following: Chris Skinner, a financial technology author, said it was “complete rubbish” to suggest the main use of cryptocurrencies was criminal….

The main blog headlines are … Are you really a digital bank? (just shake it off) I was in a conversation the other day where someone asked me how I can tell if a bank is really trying to be a digital bank or just a bank. Off-the-cuff I immediately said that I have a…

I’ve seen several friends suffering with mental health issues. Much of it is caused by stress with work but, equally, I’ve noticed that a lot of it has to do with stress with money.  Someone loses their job and only have savings that cover them for the shortest time. I‘ve seen several surveys that say…

I was in a conversation the other day where someone asked me how I can tell if a bank is really trying to be a digital bank or just a bank. Off-the-cuff I immediately said that I have a litmus test to work out the answer to that question. I didn’t realise I was so…

I’ve just spent a few days in India and the inevitable discussions around Aadhaar, UPI, demonetization and more came around. Y’all may know some of this as I’ve blogged about it before but the bit that I wanted to focus upon was the demonetization position. In November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took what many…

I’ve written a lot about Alibaba, Ant Financial and Alipay. This is not because I endorse or want to advertise the company, but because they are the first company to have embarked on a global financial inclusion strategy and have been marking it happen. Ant Financial is now some of the technology power behind PayTM…

I’m not saying I’m always right. In fact, I love it when someone points out I’m wrong, and shows me why, because I learn something. So, I was particularly interested when in Sunday’s Guardian, I saw the headline Blockchain: hype or hope. It’s quite a good article, and talks about use cases in voting, provenance…

The main blog headlines are … Making a hash of it I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share…

I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share the original data. It’s a little like when I tweet a…

Today, I appear to be pretty well-known and respected in the FinTech community. Often voted as an influencer, invited to give keynote speeches at megaconferences and the successful author of 15 books, as well as chairing and being an advisor to many companies, life is pretty good. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact,…