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Monzo allowed customers to open accounts from everywhere including Buckingham Palace … with no authentication Digital bank Monzo has just been fined £21 million by the UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), after onboarding customers claiming to live at 10 Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and even its own premises. A lack of address verification…

Agentic finance. What is that? For me, it is where you can designate your financial life to an intelligent, connected network. The core of that network is: who are you? There is you and then there is your digital twin. There are two you’s: the physical you and the digital you. So we have to…

I just received an interesting report by Deloitte about API Banking and Banking-as-a-Service … the things I talked about back in the 2000s. The report is called the future of money movement, although I would argue it is the present of money movement along with embedded finance and open banking, which are also mentioned in…

WARNING: THIS BLOG IS POLITICAL I often talk about the tech billionaires who control our lives. Why blog about this today? Well, a few disturbing developments. One is Elon Musk – you probably already know about his issues – thinking of launching a new American political party; but the other, and more intriguing, is an…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Designing our next banknotes: Notey McNoteFace? The Bank of England launched a platform yesterday for anyone to suggest who should be on Britain’s next generation of banknotes. Here’s the verbatim: As we begin to design the next series of banknotes, we invite you to share your views on potential…

I just booked a hotel stay in London the other day, confirmed with PayPal but then, shortly after checking my PayPal account, it showed two transactions. Thinking I had paid for the booking twice, I raised a dispute with hotels.com and PayPal about two charges. Now, as regular users of PayPal would know, it’s not…

The Bank of England launched a platform yesterday for anyone to suggest who should be on Britain’s next generation of banknotes. Here’s the verbatim: As we begin to design the next series of banknotes, we invite you to share your views on potential themes. Our banknotes have celebrated notable historical figures since 1970, when William Shakespeare…

“All the work I’ve done in my life will be obsolete in a few years.”  Steve Jobs This statement is pretty fundamental to life as we know it. Everything you do is worth nothing tomorrow. It is only worth something today. “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift, that’s why…

There are many fintechs I follow closely: Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, Nubank, Ant Group to name just a few. London and the UK in general has been at the centre of all of this, and is home to almost 30 fintech unicorns, with many more rising. The thing is that, as these firms mature, things change….

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the balance between privacy and permission in banking. The fact is that we don’t want people having our account details and yet, on certain occasions, it is necessary. So, what to do? In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, the dichotomy between privacy and permission access has emerged as…