Grid

I’m losing track of the number of new banks that have announced they are launching in Britain.  I say there’s 40, but there appears to be a new one every day.  The latest one is Zopa, the P2P lender, who are branching out … not that they have any branches to begin with. So, from…

Just heard a really interesting point of view from Professor Tim Congdon, CEO of International Monetary Research.  He was putting a clearly positive spin from a City viewpoint on the outlook for Brexit.  He began by talking about Medieval times of doing business and stated that most financial activity took part outside the cities they…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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,…

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 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…