I realised the other day that financial markets are confused. On the one hand, we spend all of our time criticising banks for being slow to change, inflexible, lacking customer focus and being greedy and, in some cases, fraudulent; on the other, many reckon that challenger banks are not that at all – they’re just…
In case you missed it, there was an important keynote speech by Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at a conference in France last Friday. It has some key announcements in there, so I’m reproducing the speech here for those interested in immediate payments and what Europe is doing. Keynote speech…
So one of my 2017 forecasts is coming true already: it is the year that blockchain moves out of proofs of concept and work and into the mainstream. Two great examples broke out this week from skunk works to media. The first I spotted was the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group using bitcoin for various…
I’m just starting a project on real-time, immediate, faster payments or whatever you call it. It’s basically making a payment that is either settled within seconds or the data is moved and settlement takes place at a later time, but it look immediate. There’s lots of reports out there about immediate payments, with my favourite…
I guess I’m an optimist and, in a world of pessimism, it’s an interesting place to be. I say a world of pessimism as all I’ve seen since the Brexit vote and Donald Trump being President-elect is negativity. A constant stream of we are screwed appears in my Facebook feed, and everyone seems to think…
I write so much that I sometimes forget what I’ve written, where. For example, Mark Sievert of Silicon Valley Bank made an interesting comment on my predictions for 2017: Happy New Year Chris! One topic I am not hearing much about is the OCC December decision to offer Federal Charters to Fintech firms. http://bit.ly/OCCFintech. Many…
I seem to find most of the truly exciting stories these days are happening in unexpected places. Tanzania, Indonesia, Turkey, China, Brazil … and specifically India. I wrote a fair bit about the demonetisation program in India at the beginning of December, saying that it’s a laudable objective but a flawed one, as 95% of the…
Anna Jacobson recently wrote a nice update, highlighting the best FinTech podcasts out there, including: Brett King’s Breaking Banks podcast looks at the ‘best of the best’ in the emerging FinTech sector and documents how the loss of trust, rapid consumer behavior shifts, massive technological changes, and increasing government scrutiny are disrupting the banking industry. I’m a regular co-host…
