Grid

I was not amused to hear that a UK council is bankrupt. The council blamed an IT system that cost the earth. The IT system was meant to cost £19 million, but exploded over time to a cost of over £100 million. This is nicknamed the Oracle disaster by The Register, but it runs deeper…

I recently was introduced to VDK Bank, a community bank based in Ghent, Belgium, by Rik Coeckelbergs. The bank has done something interesting, launching a three-sided coin. The idea is to triple your thinking. The three-dimensional bank focuses upon customer, community and then the third dimension is to think about how money impacts the planet….

I’ve known some companies around the fintech space for years, one of which is Backbase who have kindly invited me to speak at a couple of their events in Q4 (Amsterdam, Bangkok). The theme they are promoting is to dream big or, as Backbase’s CEO, Jouk Pleiter, puts it: “the idea is a big endorsement…

I bumped into an interesting online debate the other day, that started with Brian Armstrong, the CEO and founder of Coinbase, who always has something worthwhile to say. His opening line on a recent Coinbase blog is a good example: Coinbase is working to update the financial system that was built over 100 years ago by enabling…

This week’s main blog discussions included … 50 shades of green – is your bank sustainable? I was recently wondering which banks are the most green. Names come to mind like Co-operative Bank (UK), Triodos Bank (Netherlands), Alandsbanken (Finland), MyBank (China), Amalgamated Bank (America) and more, but they are few and far between. Some are…

During the summer, we are struck by massive wildfires taking place across the Americas and Europe. The devastation to Hawaii is specifically notable, but what about Greece, Tenerife and Canada and the rest. This is not normal. Then you go from wildfires in California to floods and mudslides in the same place. This is not…

I was recently wondering which banks are the most green. Names come to mind like Co-operative Bank (UK), Triodos Bank (Netherlands), Alandsbanken (Finland), MyBank (China), Amalgamated Bank (America) and more, but they are few and far between. Some are committed and some are just paying lip service or, as we say, greenwashing. The difference is…

For some time it has been clear that there are at least two camps in banking: those who get tech and those who don’t. This applies at the executive level just as much as it applies at the customer level. The manifestation of this in reality is a bank that thoroughly doubles down on digitalisation…

Times change. We can see that from the massive success of some firms, like NuBank, that there is good news out there in some parts of the world. Having said that, 2023 seems to be blighted by an awful lot of bad news. A company regularly picked over by the media is the massive failure…

There have been quite a lot of annoying changes to twitter in recent months. Rebranded as X with a scruffy looking logo, the service is trying to monetize its users by making the services more and more difficult to use … unless you pay. From an owners view, that makes sense. The platform needs to…