Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

High hopes, big aspirations, but reality is far from the fantasy

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…

Q: Can Elon Musk create PayPalX? A: Unlikely

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…

The Finanser’s Week: 21st August – 27th August 2023

This week’s main blog discussions include … The best challenger bank in the world? Brazil’s FinTech giant Nubank just crushed its 2Q 2023 earnings. We have never seen growth like NU’s in any challenger bank. In fact, some would claim – including me – that this ten-year-old company is not only the strongest neobank in…

AI is not big … it’s HUGE!

A few years ago, a bank CIO said to me that he was not that bothered about blockchain technologies, as these involved many externalities; he was far more interested in AI, as this could make breakthroughs with internalities. In case his words are lost in translation, what he meant is that blockchain would not deliver return…

What are you saying? Make it clear …

I’ve spent my life in marketing, sales, consulting, development, technology and finance. It’s been a good one. It’s also the reason why I roam around many different topics on this blog, and sometimes talk about more generic things than specific things. So, today’s blog is generic and not specific. It’s about marketing. Interestingly, something I…

The World in 2050 (according to Roland Berger)

You all know that I love future trend watching and so when I stumbled across Roland Berger’s Compendium of Future Trends through 2050 … how could I resist? After all, I have already given my view on the world of 2050, but Roland Berger may be more credible as they ar a global consulting firm competing…

Will micropayments drive crypto adoption?

We’ve talked for years about the need for micropayments. I can remember in the 1990s that the pay-per-view model demanded a payment for a single piece of information. Why should I subscribe for $30 a month to a website where one article has become relevant? Surely, I could pay $0.50 cents to read that one…

The best challenger bank in the world?

Brazil’s FinTech giant Nubank just crushed its 2Q 2023 earnings. We have never seen growth like NU’s in any challenger bank. In fact, some would claim – including me – that this ten-year-old company is not only the strongest neobank in the world, but one of the best-run digital banks ever, maintaining solid profitability. Here…

The Finanser’s Week: 14th August – 20th August 2023

This week’s main blog discussions include … What will happen when your brain is ’embedded’? I was thinking about embedded, intelligent finance and imagining the future. There are many scenarios, but one that I kept returning to is when you have infi inside (intelligent finance inside). A chip in your brain, and you can run…

Our future is where we do not think about money, but money thinks for us

As someone who has been writing most of his life, and specifically books for two decades, the singular focus on technology and finance has been an interesting journey. The breakthrough came in the early 2010s for me, when Digital Bank was released. Since then, I’ve travelled the world meeting visionaries in banking, finance and technology,…