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I started a theme two years ago, in prep for the next new book, about how we can trust people digitally. In a deep fake world, we cannot. A good example is the Hong Kong staffer who transferred $25m to an account after talking with her deep fake CFO in a video call. The critical…

I really hate subscription services online. There are many that automatically renew without me knowing and, even worse, there are those that you sign up to without even knowing. A good example is one I discovered on my bank account the other day. Apparently I had signed up for a service that costs £3:00 a…

As usual, clicking over LinkedIn, I got a chart that made me sit back and smile a bit. What chart? This one: Source: Brice Groche, LinkedIn The chart outlines the revenue models of Europe’s digital finance firms, and what it made me realise is the big difference in strategies of challenger banks and start-ups. When…

Half a century ago, people thought that the average person wouldn’t remember a six-digit PIN*. A quarter century later, we got usernames and passwords by the bucketload. Now, we have so many loads of buckets, each of which are meant to have their own individual access codes, none of which we can remember, that the…

This week’s main discussions include … What is an Intelligent Bank? I keep thinking about what an Intelligent Bank means. What is an Intelligent Bank? Well, strip it back to basics. An Intelligent Bank is a bank that is so embedded and intimate with my digital finance that it can predict what I should do,…

A news item arrived in my inbox describing the rise of internet and social media usage worldwide. It specifically reports which countries are using the internet the most. I somewhat disagree with the results, but it is interesting to see the ranking. According to their research, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ranks as the #1…

I just stumbled across a rich vein of information from the Bank of England on Fintech! Interestingly, they state that their “work focuses on three cross-cutting technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), distributed ledger technology (DLT), and quantum computing”. Urmmm … what about crypto and CBDCs? Anyways, the bank makes clear that it is committed to support…

After talking about an intelligent bank yesterday, I found a huge challenge with a dumb bank today. It started because I just got a charge for a renewal of a subscription that I didn’t know I had. The charge was made from my AMEX card via PayPal, so I launched questions with both. PayPal was…

I keep thinking about what an Intelligent Bank means. What is an Intelligent Bank? Well, strip it back to basics. An Intelligent Bank is a bank that is so embedded and intimate with my digital finance that it can predict what I should do, could do and can do next. It knows when I’m being…

I’ve talked for some time about bot-to-bot payments in the Agentic AI world. The idea is that you won’t have to think as money thinks for you, and payments will transfer automatically without intervention. Moving this forward is a recent announcement from Google, which has developed the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework that enables agents…