Grid

There’s a very interesting analysis of the cyber attacks on Marks & Spencer, the Co-op and Harrods on the BBC this week. If you have access to their iPlayer, then it’s well worth a watch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002d2lh/inside-the-high-street-cyberattacks If you don’t, then here’s the summary as it illustrates our fragile digital world today. In April, Marks &…

This week’s main blog discussions include … What economy would machines create? We talk a lot about AI these days or, as some call it, A1 or Al (yes, Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al) and we have now moved on to other terms including Generative AI, Agentic AI and AGI…

After lots of discussions about how AI is transforming financial services as a new, foundational technology that has massive granularity of use cases, it doesn’t always work. In a very major public about face, Klarna says it doesn’t work. This is the company that saved millions by getting rid of two of five staff. Now,…

Just continuing the AI theme, it’s really interesting to see what Stripe – latest valuation over $90 billion – is doing with the technology. Effectively, it’s tried to create a GPT for payments. The reason they are pushing the envelope is after seeing great results in earlier developments using traditional machine learning models. These resulted…

I’ve followed Clara Durodié’s Decoding AI for some time. Decoding AI is a digital publication dedicated to AI in financial services and, in her most recent update, she delves deep into Trust, Ethics and the Rise of AI in Financial Services, which is my specialist subject of the moment. I won’t repost the whole article…

We talk a lot about AI these days or, as some call it, A1 or Al (yes, Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al) and we have now moved on to other terms including Generative AI, Agentic AI and AGI which stands for Artificial General Intelligence. The thing is that these terms…

Like the United States, Europe is trying to create a united region of cross-border trade that works. In America, this is 50 member states who work in a federated structure. My impression after the recent meeting on CRD VI (Capital Requirements Directive) is that Europe’s long-term aim is to achieve the same and, today, there…

This week’s main blog discussions include … The regulation versus innovation debate continues I just attended two events – one fintech and one regulatory. The contrast could not have been more different. The fintech event was buzzing with activity and youth; the regulatory event was very serious and full of suits. It reminded me of…

Having been back in the regulatory space again recently, it reminded me of a comment made by one European Commissioner when discussing MiFID back in the day. Over drinks, we were debating the wording and detail and he said: “the point is not to get all member states to comply … the point is to…

It is notable that a few challenger neobanks are expanding footprint into telecoms, namely Revolut and N26. N26 joins Revolut in disrupting the telecommunications market The interesting thing here is that there have been many telco’s trying to move into banking – think Orange – and vice versa, but it rarely works. Orange checks out…