I’ve been talking a lot about open sourcing financial services this year and, more recently, tracking Open Banking. The Open Banking Working Group was launched just over a year by HM Treasury to create an Open Banking Standard. The standard is meant to guide how open banking data should be created, shared and used by its owners and those…
So we finished the Financial Services Club season with a discussion of the implications of Brexit on the City of London and Fintech London, with a panel debate amongst four stellar people: Sharon Bowles, former MEP and now Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted; Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO, Innovate Finance; Jeremy Light, Managing Director, Accenture Payment Services; and…
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…
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…
