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One other thing struck me as the discussions fired away in Shanghai at Lang Di … is China going to haemorrhage and bring down the world’s financial systems … or is that just what the Western media would like us to think? The reason I raise it is that I see almost every day in…

I enjoyed the LendIt conference in Shanghai, and wrote a few notes. In particular, I enjoyed hearing the story of XWBank as told by Jiang Hai, the Vice Chairman. His presentation was in Chinese but, from the simultaneous translation and slides, I picked up some interesting stats. To begin with, I woke up because the…

I was at LendIt China last week, or Lang Di as it should rightly be called. As readers know, I always get a buzz from visiting China, and this trip was no exception. It made me reflect in fact upon my last twenty plus years of coming here and seeing the country change. I first visited…

The main blog headlines are … How the world has changed with technology I was introduced to a lunch meeting by the Chairman of the Bank. As he made the introduction, he gave a personal account of how technology had changed the world during his lifetime. This is not his speech, but my version of…

I was introduced to a lunch meeting by the Chairman of the Bank. As he made the introduction, he gave a personal account of how technology had changed the world during his lifetime. This is not his speech, but my version of his speech. I trust you like it. So, I grew up in a…

I recently blogged about JP Morgan Chase spending $10 billion a year on technology of which $3 billion goes into new projects. There were then several other announcements that caught my attention about Citibank and Bank of America investing similar amounts in digital. The question it prompted is: why are you spending $3,000,000,000 on new…

I sometimes find it hard to deal with our world of money these days. Everyone keeps asking should I buy bitcoin and my answer is always it’s your choice. I don’t believe in bitcoin, but I’m not one of those doom mongers who say it’s going to die. It won’t die. It’s pout there in…

I was reading The Guardian’s John Quiggin’s article yesterday, about banking being geared towards the 1% and a major crash being needed to fix it. John Quiggin is an economist at the University of Queensland and the thrust of his article is that “financialised capitalism has failed, and cannot be fixed by more and better…

There’s been an interesting but hidden trend taking place. It started in China with Tencent and Alipay and has now gone global. The phenomenon is called QR codes. QR, or Quick Response if you prefer the longer form, is a code that originated in Japan in the 1990s, and has gradually grown from a system…

The main blog headlines this week are … Every $1 in $50 in the banks is laundered money (and maybe more) I’ve made the comment many times that it is astounding that around $2 trillion is laundered through the banks of the world each year, up from $1.6 trillion in 2009. It’s about 2.7% of global…