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The art of farketing

A colleague at The Financial Times picked out this quote from William Burroughs … … and it piqued my thoughts. Burroughs was a huge inspiration to David Bowie, who is a huge inspiration to me. I’ve read Naked Lunch, where this quote was taken, but they used this quote in relation to ESG. The Naked Lunch author…

Six FinTech’s making the world a better place

I’ve written a lot recently about how technology can make the world a better place (read Digital for Good if you want to know more). It sounds esoteric but there are concrete examples from Alipay’s Ant Forest to Alandsbanken’s Baltic sea card, Green Finance is becoming a thing. So here are six FinTech firms who…

What’s up? FIVE banks to pay $1 billion in fines for illegal chats

It’s thirteen years since I had the idea of using social media for insider trading. TBH, any media can be used to buck the system. These days we talk about Telegram and Signal, but a few years ago it was Blackberry Messenger and Facebook. Whenever technology develops anonymity, crime will follow. We might look for…

The Finanser’s Week: 22nd August – 28th August 2022

This week’s main blog discussions include … My data is my data Data ownership is a big battleground. Wanna know why? Check this out:* A man calls Pizza hut to order a pizza… CALLER:  Is this Pizza Hut? GOOGLE:    No sir, it’s Google Pizza. CALLER:  I must have dialed a wrong number, sorry. GOOGLE:  No sir,…

My data is my data

Data ownership is a big battleground. Wanna know why? Check this out:* A man calls Pizza hut to order a pizza… CALLER:  Is this Pizza Hut? GOOGLE:    No sir, it’s Google Pizza. CALLER:  I must have dialed a wrong number, sorry. GOOGLE:  No sir, Google bought Pizza Hut last month. CALLER:  OK. I would like to…

MasterCard or MasterChip?

I’ve said for years that MasterCard has the wrong name. Cards are so last century. This century is all about the chip, so MasterCard should be renamed MasterChip. For the first time the other day, I found a banker who agrees with me. Reuters reports that Brazil’s central bank chief Roberto Campos Neto said he believes…

The end of cash = the end of privacy?

Inspired by an article by Ilias Louis Hatzis, and my recent musings around a cashless world, I wondered what privacy is these days? What is private? Are we bothered about privacy? I guess many have let their guard down about privacy this century as, when everything is online, we no longer have any. We allow…

The Brazilian star that is Nu

I was recently presenting in Brazil, and did a fair bit of research and networking about the FinTech scene there. The biggest story is Nubank, parent company Nu, the challenger bank that’s become one of the biggest and brightest in the world. Valued at close to $50 billion when they IPO’d in December 2021, the…

A dystopian or utopian future? Money is the core

I got into a debate about my blog from Friday about money creating inequality, and how the future of space and sci-fi would have no money. I guess this resonates with most of my writing from discussing Metropolis – one of my favourite films, along with its many successors such as Hunger Games and In…

The Finanser’s Week: 15th August – 21st August 2022

This week’s main blog discussions include … In space, no one can take your money The strapline for the film Alien was that in space, no one can hear you scream. It doesn’t sound quite as scary, but I was thinking about the cashless world and realised that: In case you cannot see the words:…

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