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Here are our key posts for the past week … How the system crushes the poor Building on yesterday’s discussion of the digital divide turning into a human divide*, I find it intriguing how we talk incessantly about financial inclusion and how technology will bank the unbanked.  It is our dream.  But is it just…

Building on yesterday’s discussion of the digital divide turning into a human divide*, I find it intriguing how we talk incessantly about financial inclusion and how technology will bank the unbanked.  It is our dream.  But is it just a dream? The reason for thinking this is that poverty and inclusion is yet another area,…

I love the predictions of scientists, but they’re often wrong.  The internet has a litany of stupid predictions from IBM’s President saying that there’s a worldwide market for about five computers to The Atlantic predicting that, by the year 2000, we would no longer be engaged in wars. The latest predictions are that, thanks to improvements…

I didn’t realise until the other day that the Bank of England has a blog Bank Underground.  Finally, a boring old British bank with a blog.  Not a consumer bank of course – none of those blog – but a good old central bank. The Bank makes clear it’s not the opinions of the institution…

I recently opened an investment fund for blockchain start-ups in partnership with Life.SREDA, who produce a report on the state of FinTech twice a year.  The latest report, almost 300 pages of analysis, provide more insights of the first half of the year in FinTech [Money of the Future 1H’2016 and Chinese, Korean and Japanese…

Apparently, I am a miscreant.  I am the one guy who managed to break PayPal.  What?  OK, here’s the story.  The next 2,000 words tell the story but, if you’d rather miss that and cut to the chase, jump to the end. Most of my customers wire me the money.  American customers are more of…

Here are our key posts for the past week … Applying Blockchain to Clearing and Settlement I’ve talked a lot about blockchain, but not much lately about the use cases, of which four stand out in terms of real activity: Clearing and Settlement, Trade Finance, Payments and Digital Identity.  I thought I’d do a deeper dive…

I can’t finish writing my blockchain and DLT dialogue without wrapping up the missing bits.  This blog series is not meant to be an exhaustive list of every company and every use case, just the ones that stand out for me in a banking context.  There are others such as syndicated loans, compliance and more…

Digital identity is a complex area, as discussed yesterday.  First, it is focused upon shared ledgers and blockchain, not just blockchain; second, it needs to have some permission basis; third, we need to have a structure agreed for who is providing permissions; and fourth, it is a structural challenge for industry and government, rather than…

In my final deep dive into blockchain use cases, I come to digital identity.  Now this is a thorny area for three reasons. First, we need to understand what we mean by identity before we can talk about how blockchains could help. Second, we need to understand the difference between blockchain and shared ledgers which,…