Grid

I blogged a short while ago about Roboadvisors, and with the recent stock market meltdown due to China’s economy slowdown, it’s interesting to see today’s Financial Times talking about the impact on these fledgling firms. According to the FT, the emergent roboadvisor market that includes Personal Capital, Betterment and Wealthfront, and now managing a combined $100…

Our main stories of this week includes … Who wants to be a (Fintech) Unicorn? For the past year, there’s been lots of talk about Fintech Unicorns – start-up companies with over a billion dollar valuation launched since 2000.  Jim Bruene at Finovate – register for Finovate Europe with 20% discount using FSClub20 – wrote about so…

There’s lots of discussions about financial markets and their different structures.  Retail and commercial banking are likened to farms, whilst investment banking is a jungle.  Retail and commercial banking have dull products likened to chickens.  Look after them and they produce regular and predictable results.  Investment banking is just full of testosterone fueled animals that…

I don’t normally blog about a particular start-up or specific company, but today’s an exception as there’s a company that’s caught my eye because it’s appearing everywhere.  Literally every tech show I’m attending, they’re there and winning awards.  This company won €30,000 in the BBVA Open Talent Competition last September, a Meffy award in October…

So I just got back from Hong Kong having keynoted at the NextBank FF16 Fintech Finals conference which ran Monday and Tuesday, in partnership with StartmeupHK. A highlight of the week was a fireside chat with Elon Musk, who appeared before a sold out invitation-only audience which I felt lucky to be invited along to,…

I just discovered Thomson Reuters predictions for 2016 with two related to Fintech that stand out: There is no Uber of Finance Most Fintech start-ups will partner with or be acquired by banks Interesting.  I have blogged before that the Uber of Finance is the blockchain, so maybe don’t agree with that statement, but the…

  For the past year, there’s been lots of talk about Fintech Unicorns – start-up companies with over a billion dollar valuation launched since 2000.  Jim Bruene at Finovate – register for Finovate Europe with 20% discount using FSClub20 – wrote about so many Fintech unicorns in July 2015, showing the list increasing four-fold in just a…

Our main stories of this week includes … Banking becomes a series of components … and loses $1 trillion Some technology trends are highly predictable. One such trend is the modularization of banking, a theme picked up in a new Oliver Wyman report that’s free to coincide with Davos. You can download the report here, but…

One question that crops up regularly is how do we open source the bank, Chris?  The reason is that the bank has built itself over decades through thousands of programmes across hundreds of servers into this massively complex technological spaghetti that cannot be unravelled.  That spaghetti has to be serviced by thousands of programmers and…

Some technology trends are highly predictable. One such trend is the modularization of banking, a theme picked up in a new Oliver Wyman report that’s free to coincide with Davos. You can download the report here, but it’s basically saying something we’ve known since the 1990s: banking is a set of component pieces that customers…