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Continuing the theme of payments in 2025 I really liked the view of McKinsey, who produced a really nice report to coincide with SIBOS last year. What did they say? In short “simpler interfaces, complex reality”. What does that mean? It means that “payments are becoming disconnected from accounts, and the number of players is proliferating,…

I got a whole load of payments predictions for 2025 … just a shame that it was no one paying me! Seriously though, a lot of people shared a McKinsey report that focuses upon this area, released around Sibos 2024, that opens with: “The tantalizing vision for global payments has long been that they’d be safe,…

I wanted to make this a short blog update on tech changes in 2025, but it’s incredibly long and, unsurprisingly, nearly all about AI. If 2023 was the year of ChatGPT and 2024 AI, this is the year of Agentic AI. What’s the difference? Well AI has so far been pretty much a pull technology. You…

I was tempted to include this in the economics section, but the focus is different. The focus here is on your company, its staff and work. Economics is focused upon countries, markets and investments. The two are different. Nevertheless, it is hard not to cover the same things, as almost all business predictions seem to…

Welcome to 2025! As usual, at the start of the year, there are a whole raft of predictions as to what will happen. I used to write my own personal predictions and review them at the end of the year but now, with so many predicting so many things, I’ll leave to the panel of…

This week’s main blog discussions include … The Top Ten Blog Posts for 2024 2024 has been a bumper year for this blog. According to Google Analytics, the blog has 175,000 active users, an increase of 30% over 2023, with near 300,000 views and a million interactions and so, as usual, I share the most…

It’s the end of the year. I was wondering how you would summarise 2024? Someone asked this question on Reddit and the general answers appear to be that the world is going to hell and there is little we can do about it. Nice, although the regular surveys by Ipsos disagree: Despite the cost of…

2024 has been a bumper year for this blog. According to Google Analytics, the blog has 175,000 active users, an increase of 30% over 2023, with near 300,000 views and a million interactions and so, as usual, I share the most read blog entries at the end of the year. Here are the Top 10…

It’s interesting to see AI appearing more and more in financial conversations. A few examples just this week: AI’s Role in Banking: A Game Changer or Just Another Fad? How Artificial Intelligence is changing banking How AI is helping banks support sustainability transformation. The ability to quickly process large amounts of data makes AI models…

I asked the question: What’s a cash machine for if no-one uses cash? in the 1990s. As the guy heading up the strategy for cash machines for a major cash machine company beginning with N and ending in R, it was a good question to ask. Thing is that no-one took the question very seriously…