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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…

I was talking with some friends and realised suddenly that we had not talked about branches or branch automation for a long time.  In fact, and this was the dawning, we haven’t talked about branch of the future for a long time. Branch of the future. It’s almost laughable writing that down today, and yet…

I was asked the other day about what’s on the CEO’s agenda?  Revenue, restructuring, regulations, share price, bonus, wife, mistress … whoops, sorry, I digress. In fact the four key areas top of mind with most bank CEOs are: Competition: and that’s not just interbank competition, but also new competitors in the form of challenger…

Our main stories of the past two weeks include … 2016 banking predictions That’s not 2,016 banking predictions, which could be good, but banking predictions for the year 2016. Happy New Year. As is usual at the start of the year, I normally make a bunch of predictions about what will happen in retail, investment and…

I was tempted to blog about Bitcoin 3.0 this morning, but Marcus Swanepoel has already done that – news of Bitcoin’s death has been overstated – so I thought I’d blog about robbery instead.  Daylight robbery is far more exciting than investing in the future after all, and there has been a big case over here…