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I’m often asked whether banks should be afraid of the threat of Fintech.  My answer is that most Fintech is enhancing what banks do, rather than threatening their core business.  I sum this up as wrappers, replacers and reformers, and that the only Fintech firms we should really fear are those that replace core bank…

I was talking to a City chap this week about the Brexit vote and he felt it was clear we would leave.  I said I couldn’t see that because there was not a single logical economic reason for leaving.  He said that I was stupid to think of this as logical.  It’s emotional.  The Leave…

There is a lot of talk about blockchain.  A lot.  Loads.  But when you get past all the talk, what is actually happening with blockchain?  Answer: not enough. I say this because there are some stand out firms out there – like R3, Digital Asset Holdings, Ripple – who have gained traction with the banks,…

I promise to shut up about African developments after this post, for a while anyway, but there’s a definite feeling that Africa may set the standards for a cheaper, easier financial system in the future, as blogged last week.  In fact, when I was asked about Africa as a continent in Kenya, I said that…

Our main stories of this week includes … The African Mobile Revolution, Part One Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya.  It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa.  What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and…

In a final post about African transformation through technology, I’ve covered the key themes: mobile financial inclusion, smartphone innovation through apps, digital currencies and blockchain identities.  One thing missed is a mention of the Water ATM. I hadn’t heard of automated machines for water being deployed before, although it started in India in 2013 and…

ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value.  A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what?  That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa. …

One of the gating factors to financial inclusion is the mobile network itself. It sounds simple to say that all of Africa can have access to mobile money, and they can, but if each telco has different wallet structures, charges and fees, then the ease of usage falls sharply. This is why interoperability is a…

I enjoyed much of the discussions at Dot Finance, especially the presentation from Kosta Peric of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Kosta’s been a good friend for some years and features as one of the case study interviews in ValueWeb.  He was also responsible for getting Bill Gates to keynote at SIBOS in 2014,…

Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya.  It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa.  What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and mobile financial inclusion, is that Africa is actually leading the world in…