Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

#Singapore’s #Fintech Festival

As I look back on my travels this year, it’s interesting to see where I have and haven’t been.  Spent a lot of time in Singapore, Istanbul, London (obviously), New York and Washington.  I count these as my hotbeds of fintech innovation.  I’ve also briefly dropped in to Hong Kong, Berlin and Bangkok.  These are…

Paranoia-as-a-service

I heard this phrase – paranoia-as-a-service – for the first time recently, but I’m hearing paranoia in banking mentioned more and more often. It’s not surprising after the tesco hack, but what can you do about it? If banks are meant to be the most secure stores of value in this world, then how can…

The Finanser’s Week: 6th November – 13th November 2016 Dsff

  The highlights of this week’s blog include …. Look at financial inclusion for innovation I guess in concluding this weeks’ thoughts, I’m left reflecting on a similar idea to the one I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a world turned on its head.  This time it’s a different take on the same…

Look at financial inclusion for innovation

I guess in concluding this weeks’ thoughts, I’m left reflecting on a similar idea to the one I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a world turned on its head.  This time it’s a different take on the same conundrum.  We live in the developed economies complaining about legacy; developing economies are just excited…

Are we globalising or localising?

I consider myself a citizen of the world.  I guess that’s because I fly around so much.  Everywhere I go, I find the same thing.  Warm, fantastic people who welcome me like a brother and complain about the idiot running their country.  This is common to every country, just that some idiots are more extreme…

British bank has a third of its customers’ accounts hacked

We’ve seen some pretty strong attacks on banks cyberdefences in the past year. Three major incidents in the SWIFT network; 50 at the Federal Reserve; problems at the Bank of England and many other central banks; a major incident at the Danish payment processorNETS; and big banks like HSBC and JPMorgan have all been affected. Admittedly,…

Who’s going to win the US election?

Today is the US election and what a terrible choice they have.  You would think out of 320 million people to choose from, that they could have come up with a better two than these two.  Anyway, I’m not American and it’s not my position to comment on these things, but I did pick up…

A glimpse into the future, last part: space money

A final thought on the future from a banking perspective.  So we will be colonizing Mars by 2040 according to Elon Musk.  Why?  Because this planet is not going to sustain the population it has emerging.  When I was born there were half the number of people on Earth that there are today.  Some say…

The Finanser’s Week: 31st October – 5th November 2016

This week’s blogging has been all about the future. A glimpse of the future, part one I know I talk about banking and technology most of the time, but I also have other topics of interest.  Art, history, travel, fine wine … although I obviously look at them all from a banker’s point of view…

A glimpse into the future, part five: space

Well, finally we get to the part of this series I’ve been looking forward to writing about the most: space.  No longer the final frontier as we’re conquering space fast.  From landing explorers on Mars to capturing amazing images of Pluto, we have begun our journey to boldly go where no one has gone before. …