I recently hosted Nick Ogden, the founder of WorldPay and serial entrepreneur, at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings in Stockholm and Oslo. Nick is now launching the first new UK clearing bank for over 250 years called ClearBank. I’d heard a few rumblings about ClearBank, but hadn’t really go the message until I saw him…
Someone made an interesting comment about Google this week: banks can attack Google’s soft underbelly. What? Google? Soft underbelly? And banks can attack it? You must be joking. The presenter (Conor McAleavey, Chief Innovatoin Officer with Leveris) went on to outline what he meant and, as he talked about it, I thought there may be…
I was really interested in a presentation by Benny Boye Johansen, Head of OpenAPI at Saxo Bank, at our recent Nordic Finance Innovation meetings. In particular, he put up some slides that were both illuminating, amusing and strange. They were Google Trends charts looking at Payments API, PSD2 and Open Banking. Google trends tracks the…
This week I’ve been mainly blogging about developments in Africa and China. Thoughts on Dot Finance Africa … We need some education (but no thought control) I often think we need a reality check when it comes to digital finance. Many of the pundit analysts and influencers out there believe no one needs a branch…
I’m hearing murmurs of a financial crisis rising again. It’s just rumours and gossip, but sometimes there’s no smoke without fire. My forecast for another major global financial crisis was that it wouldn’t occur until the 2040s but, as James Dimon noted, a financial crisis generally appears around every seven years. Not a big one,…
I saw a really interesting presentation in Kigali at the Dot Finance Africa FinTech Summit from Yasaman Hadjibashi, Chief Creation Officer with Barclays Africa (soon to be something else). She began with a discussion of the make-up of Africa: By 2050, it is expected that the population will double from 1.2 billion today to 2.4 billion…
Expanding on yesterday’s discussion of how MNOs are sweeping up business for the underbanked and unbanked, Igor Pesin of Life.SREDA posted a lovely update giving even more detail. Here is how he saw things … Fintech in Rwanda: the place where Telcos are surpassing Banks in the financial sector Telcos dominate in the financial sector…
During the discussions at Dot Finance Africa, there was a very interesting dialogue about the mobile network operators (MNOs), with panels featuring Airtel and M-PESA. It was interesting to hear them talking directly about how they focus upon the customer experience and their singular objective of convenience. Both MNOs talked about customer convenience. The convenience…
This week’s main blog headlines are … Should I buy some bitcoin now? I’m being asked this a lot as the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have increased ten-fold in the past few weeks. Good for those who have some. Bemusing for those who don’t. There are a range of factors driving the rise…
