Grid

I have house insurance for the contents and building. On top of that, I have a specialist insurance policy for my collection of rare things. I recently decided not to renew the latter. Why? Well, the house does have a few rare things inside … but no receipts. The things date back years and, in…

When I was a lad … OK, you can stop reading already if that’s going to be dealbreaker … when I was a lad, we had a holiday in Devon, a south-western county of England where my parents originated. There’s a lovely place there called Westward Ho! I have no idea why it has an…

I find the world fascinating. Humans are amazing. We just launched the James Webb Telescope to see world’s formed billions of years ago and the Elizabeth Line. Both are engineering projects of immense challenge, and immense cost, as covered by many documentaries. Then I read that Chinese social media celebrates the assassination of Shinzo Abe,…

2022 is proving to be a challenging year and, if my experience proves true, is harder than anything since we have seen since the pandemic began. After two years of lockdown, funding is still freely available but harder to find, and valuations are way down on previous years. Nevertheless, according to new data released by…

This week’s main blog discussions include … It’s not a stablecoin … it’s just Stable! A PR firm reached out to me the other day, saying: want to hear about a FinTech firm started on a farm? I said yes and, before I knew it, Stable became my new, favourite FinTech start-up. It meant that I soon…

I’ve been lucky. I got my first job just after a massive economic crisis and haven’t really been exposed to one since. I live in a bubble that has never had a war. I have never been in a country with double-digit inflation, during my working life. What that means is that I’ve never really…

After all the turbulence of the crypto winter, things seem to have bottomed out and a mini-rally is underway. Keep that in mind as you can see from the comments and stats that a lot of people think that crypto is here to stay, regardless of the recent dip. Buy the dip? Maybe or maybe…

A corporate treasurer reached out to me in his frustration over the forced move from MT to MX messaging, saying it’s going to going to cost €500,000 or more for most corporates to comply with just one of the required changes not including the full development cost of a new file format. That may seem…

UK Finance recently released its latest fraud report for 2021. The report shows a total of over £1.3 billion was stolen. Unauthorised fraud was £730.4 million and authorised push payment (APP) fraud was £583.2 million, with nearly 40% of APP losses due to impersonation scams. The banking and finance industry prevented a further £1.4 billion of unauthorised…

A PR firm reached out to me the other day, saying: want to hear about a FinTech firm started on a farm? I said yes and, before I knew it, Stable became my new, favourite FinTech start-up. It meant that I soon hooked up in a conversation with the firm’s founder, Rich Counsell. Here’s our chat: Chris…