I remember organising my first banking conferences in the 1990s and there was a regular mantra amongst the memes of the folks speaking on stage. There is more change coming and you’re going to be dead meat unless you change. It was a common theme to hear the word disintermediated being used in these speeches. …
Building on my challenger bank discussions, there’s some interesting points coming out of a new report by Price Waterhouse Coopers (or Playing the Wrong Cards as they’re now called, after the Oscars) on challenger banking. It’s well worth a read, especially as they found that having branches is more important than mobile apps. The survey showed…
Being in New York on International Women’s Day last week, a surprising event occurred. No, it’s not that Donald Trump renamed the day after his favourite cat, but that a statue appeared next to the Wall Street Bull. A Fearless Girl. The bronze statue is sponsored by State Street and celebrates the idea that women…
I was having a conversation with a friend about the issues at Monzo this week (among others). Their third-party payments processor had an outage at the weekend so the cards couldn’t be used. Then they had crashes on Android and lost payments in the app. It’s a challenge being a challenger. However, the reason for…
I got a laugh the other day when I referred to Grade II Listed Banks, but I was serious. For overseas readers, we have a system in Britain of listing heritage buildings. They have various grades which restrict what you can do with them. Grade I means you can’t really change the building at all, whilst Grade…
Seven years ago, the first new retail bank in almost a century got its licence to open: Metro Bank. Now, there are so many new banks starting up in Britain (and across Europe) that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with it all. There are app-only start-up banks (Atom, Monzo, Starling, Tandem); foreign exchange payment cards (Revolut, SuperCard); personal…
I’ve just been alerted by friend Gijs Boudewijn to the release of a fascinating white paper by BIS, the Bank for International Settlements (the guys who do Basel stuff and are big cohonez in banking circles). Their Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: an analytical framework…
As referenced in my R3 fake news last week, there are various camps out there fighting for the cryptocurrency crown. The lead runners are bitcoin and Ethereum, and both have serious backing. However, it’s still early days. I keep stressing that we need to remember we are experimenting here, and the end game is still…
