Grid

Building on yesterday’s news, the consumer research organisation Which? just released a report with a whole bunch of stats on UK bank branch closures.  Over 1,000 branches have closed in the last two years, with HSBC being most aggressive, shutting over 27% of their network. Source: BBC A total of 1,046 branches – equivalent to…

I was pointed to this article in the weekend’s Daily Wail by the one and only Duena Blomstrom, and it makes for great reading.  It’s all about the death squeals of consumers and journalists as they see the last bank in the village leave.  Here’s the list of HSBC bank branch closures this year alone: What…

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…