Grid

Here are our key posts for the past week … Machines that learn will decimate human jobs … or will they? I was having a debate yesterday where a bank executive was asking me about what the hottest things in FinTech are right now.  My answer was machine learning (AI) and blockchain.  There are others…

WARNING WARNING WARNING This is a semi-technical blog update and it is rather long (20 minutes read). If you don’t like dealing with bits and bytes, you may want to turn away now. I’ve been meaning to also write a blog update on all things about blockchain for a while, but just haven’t had time. …

As mentioned last week, the House of Lords gathered a number of leading people to discuss blockchain and its potential to develop a digital currency for the UK.  Brave New Coin summarises the whole affair nicely, and I want to keep this for the record, so have copied their update over here. House of Lords…

I was having a debate yesterday where a bank executive was asking me about what the hottest things in FinTech are right now.  My answer was machine learning (AI) and blockchain.  There are others such as contextual commerce, voice recognition and digital assistants, but machine learning and blockchain are top of mind. His response was…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you may have noticed the rise of Pokémon Go.  It’s been in the news everywhere, mainly because kids seem to be gathering in places they shouldn’t.  Equally, the game has been responsible for everything from finding dead bodies to resurrecting other ones.   Mayhem as rare Pokémon appears in…

Friend of the Financial Services Club and journalist with Financial News Anna Irrera has recently started producing a weekly roundup of FinTech news.  She’s kindly agreed to let me republish this summary here on The Finanser, so here goes: Hello everyone, Fintech things you should know: UBS appointed a new head of tech, London-based Revolut raised £12…

As mentioned, ANZ are happy keeping their 40-year-old version of a system – why does that always remind me of some movie title – and I have decided to shut up about this after one last blog update.  This one is a final piece of perspective to this whole discussion, and puts a 40-year-old system in…

I tried to make some allowance for ANZ running a 40-year-old core system yesterday, by pointing to the fact that people are slow to change and there may well be no compelling reason to switch a legacy system. Even though I’ve tried to make the case many times: Banks with pre-internet age core systems have…

I talked about the legacy problem yesterday and, in reality, the problem isn’t just the legacy system. It’s the legacy people and legacy customer. The legacy people are the ones who sit in the organisation and resist change. They know where their cheese is and they don’t want it to move. This appears to be…

Well I couldn’t let this one go by without commenting on it.  A regular theme in the blog is get rid of old technology if it’s running core systems.  The reason is that systems designed before Mark Zuckerberg was born are surely not fit for purpose in this day and age.  Well, the CIO of…