Grid

I’ve written a bit about space this year, because it’s getting really interesting.  It’s also because I’m a frequent flyer and can see how our world of transport has changed so, so much. When I was little, my grandparents lived in a small village in North Devon.  They had lived there their whole lives, except…

This week’s main blog items are … The unbankable banked Reflecting on the last year, it’s been crazy.  I feel like I’ve spent most of the year jumping on and off airplanes.  Most visited cities are London, for obvious reasons, and Singapore.  I must have been there five or six times this year, and that…

Reflecting on the last year, it’s been crazy.  I feel like I’ve spent most of the year jumping on and off airplanes.  Most visited cities are London, for obvious reasons, and Singapore.  I must have been there five or six times this year, and that reflects Singapore’s ambitions to be a Fintech hub.  I’ve also…

It’s amazing how you can feel glee and anger in the same moment or, as I call it, glanger.  I have this so often with technology.  The glee of finding a new app that solves a major pain in your life; the anger when that app freezes and you have to restart your phone to…

I’m relaxing and thinking.  A bad combination.  Just had several sessions with different conferences on Brexit, Open API’s, PSD2, Open Sourcing, Open Banking, Innovation and more … and it all seems like such drivel.  One of the sessions was asking the question: is it time to drop the curtain on innovation theatre?  Yes, for gawds…

I wrote a while ago about the amazing digital identity scheme in India called Aadhaar.  It’s a card-based biometric scheme using a centralised database.  Of course, today, they would have developed the scheme on a mobile wallet with a distributed ledger but hey, you can’t win them all.  Some say that this just illustrates how…

I’ve noticed a great deal of schadenfreude related to the R3 bump.  Lots of people saying that blockchain is past its sell-by date, R3 are bust and distributed ledgers are dead.  I think it’s related to the journalists who, having delighted in bigging up blockchain big time for the past two years are now relishing…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … What do retail customers want? I blogged the other day about too many banks and that there’s not a big enough market for forty of them here in Britain.  It made me think about what do customers really want?  We talk about digital, apps, mobile…

I was intrigued by a comment made by Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, on a panel I chaired the other day.  Anne used to work for ABN Amro, AIB and RBS, and is now a Fintech start-up and her comment went along the lines of: “I’ve now realised that the simple changes I needed…

When I was growing up, America was the superpower that we followed and Russia was in a Cold War.  Today, there are two superpowers – America and China – and Russia is still in a bit of a Cold War that might be thawed by Donald Trump. So when it comes to Fintech, there’s two…