Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Women in FinTech: do you care?

I’ve written quite often about Sexism in the City and am intrigued by discussions of diversity, or the lack thereof, in both banking and technology. Google and more have been told they’re not hiring enough women, and Amazon’s AI engine recently trained itself to ignore women’s applications based on historical hiring. So, I thought I would…

The Finanser’s Week: 11th March – 17th March 2019

The main blog headlines are … Transforming the bank: three phases of change I’ve mentioned quite often that you cannot sort out all of the banks systems and structures overnight. It has to be a slow burn and often takes more than five years. It also appears to take place in three phases. The first…

Transforming the bank: three phases of change

I’ve mentioned quite often that you cannot sort out all of the banks systems and structures overnight. It has to be a slow burn and often takes more than five years. It also appears to take place in three phases. The first phase is to sort out the basics. If there are known issues in…

Which camp are you in?

There are five camps out there. The first is the FinTech camp. This camp sit around the campfire and go “down with banks, down with banks”. They believe banks are out-dated legacy firms who have no idea about the modern age of technology. They believe banks are money-grabbing Shylocks, purely trying to steal the cash…

What does the #Brexit vote mean for banking and fintech?

Being British with a British accent, everyone asks me about what life will be like with Brexit … and my answer is that I have no idea. I can see that the country is divided, and we have real issues, but then don’t most countries? I can also see that the government is completely divided…

Will Facebook become the world’s central bank?

I got a large number of pings over the weekend to read and comment on an article on Medium by Lance Ng headlined: Facebook Plans to Become World’s Biggest Central Bank? It is a conjectured article that takes the story from The New York Times discussing Facebook creating its own cryptocurrency (Facebook and Telegram Are…

What is better: some job or no job?

This is an old but true story of my very own. Back in the day, I worked for a computer firm that had a unique piece of hardware and software called the Contents Addressable File Store, or CAFS for short. I was the marketing manager for this remarkable piece of technology and, for the benefit…

The Finanser’s Week: 4th March – 10th March 2019

The main blog headlines are … It’s only words … why values and missions are questionable I go around a lot of banks and am always struck by their similarities and differences. To be honest, there are more similarities than differences. Most have big corporate offices, with great views over their home cities; their branches…

It’s only words … why values and missions are questionable

I go around a lot of banks and am always struck by their similarities and differences. To be honest, there are more similarities than differences. Most have big corporate offices, with great views over their home cities; their branches are now well-lit stores with open counters; and their apps all offer what appears at first…

Trust me, I’m a banker …

There’s a lot of talk about trust when you meet with people in finance. Customers trust us with their money … there is trust in banks … we are trusted when it comes to advice … our brand is a trusted brand. I usually keep quiet as most of that conversation is pure BS. Sure,…