Grid

OK, so I said earlier this week that I normally get asked about security by someone who is threatened by the onwards march of digitalisation. Sure, security is important, and the issue is that for every step of innovation we create a step of risk. We don’t know the risks until they are exposed and…

Many people delight in digging up a quote from Bill Gates in the 1990s, when he was talking about banks as dinosaurs and famously stated: “we need banking, but we don’t need banks anymore”. Yay! We can stuff the horrible big, bad banks and replace them with lovely tech. Interestingly, twenty years after that famous…

At the end of most of my speeches, I get someone raising questions around security and regulations. What was interesting is that I got the regulatory one this week, but my host told me afterwards that one of the bankers in the audience had come up and said he was surprised that I hadn’t talked…

This week’s main blog headlines are … The ten-year ticking timebomb I’ve been saying for so long now that banks need to replace core legacy systems that I’m boring myself, but here I go again. The reason I’m talking about it again is that, even though some disagree and think they can fudge the issue…

I was in a conversation with a regulator about bank competition, and they wondered how I saw banks changing. In particular, they were concerned about collegiate – read that as bank cartels – actions by the banks to protect their own interests. I thought about it and said that I did not believe that banks…

I was listening to someone talking about monolith versus microservices structures recently, and they likened it to an old car versus a new one. Old cars were made of metal and welded together into a solid machine where, if any part breaks, you have to replace the whole machine. The machine is unwieldy, slow and…

Why are most bank brands just acronyms? I know it’s a silly question, as banks are acronyms because who wants to say John Pierpont Morgan Chase when it’s easier just to say JPM, but it is endemic to banking that banks are acronyms. I was just writing down a few: HSBC, SCB, OCBC, DBS, ICICI,…

I’ve been saying for so long now that banks need to replace core legacy systems that I’m boring myself, but here I go again. The reason I’m talking about it again is that, even though some disagree and think they can fudge the issue with plug-ins, I believe that the new competition will decimate banks…

We hosted ePassi at our recent launch of Nordic Finance Innovate (NFI) in Helsinki, Finland. ePassi are the partner firm of Alipay, bringing the app to Finland to allow Chinese tourists to pay easily when travelling via Finland to Europe. It’s been very successful as it was initially launched to allow tourists to come and…

This week’s main blog headlines are … Regulating the unregulated I was thinking about this question of how to regulate global technology platforms that don’t recognise national boundaries, mainly in the context of crypto and digital currencies. How can you regulate a global currency that has no view of state or national laws? Obviously, you…