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A further discussion about data and the key issue of who should have access. During a recent lunch, we talked about how Chinese citizens allow the government to see all of their digital footprint via Tencent and Alibaba, but they do this for a number of reasons. The advantage of an easy lifestyle superapps and…

Building on my blog post last week, showing the views of 1997, it was clear years ago that banking was under siege. However, that siege never happened. Tesco thought that most banks were “a bunch of clowns”, but never cracked the market and still have not. Sainsbury may have onboarded customers, but they never built…

The main blog headlines are … Treating Customers Unfairly (#HSBC) I’ve blogged many times that so called free banking is a fallacy.  It’s something I have blogged about for a decade, and the recurring theme is free banking should be banned by the regulator as it’s only free as long as you don’t go overdrawn….

I’ve blogged many times that so called free banking is a fallacy.  It’s something I have blogged about for a decade, and the recurring theme is free banking should be banned by the regulator as it’s only free as long as you don’t go overdrawn. The result is that the most financially challenged group of…

Back in 1997, I was tasked with writing a strategy for NCR. The strategy had to review the likelihood that other industries would enter banking and what threat or opportunity this offered. I spent a long time on this and concluded that the most likely outcome would be that telecommunications firms would acquire banks and…

I’ve noted that the bitcoin swings and roundabouts tend to often cycle around the hope and expectation of the US SEC giving approval to a bitcoin ETF … only to find that they never do and so it goes around. In an interesting article by Dave Weisberger on Coindesk, there may be a reason for…

I’ve said on a number of occasions recently that banking and finance is at the heart of the climate crisis. Banks provide the financing for fossil fuel firms who are destroying the planet. The key numbers: Coal supplies a third of all energy worldwide, with the top coal consumers and producers in 2018 being China, India, and the United States. Carbon…

Regular readers of the blog know that I’m a fanboy of Alibaba and their financial firm Ant Financial which operates Alipay, the major payments system of China. On November 11, they had their Singles Day jamboree. The equivalent in China of Black Friday, some say, but more than five times bigger*. The figures this year…

The main blog headlines are … Are banks adapting in the right way? I picked up a few innovative changes taking place this week within banks. In fact, I should point out that banks are not static beasts, as many claim. They are changing all the time, doing things all the time, adapting all the…

Building on my discussion yesterday about offshore tax havens and decentralisation to avoid governance in both the physical and virtual world, there’s a more fundamental issue at large here. Tax avoidance. Some people hear the words “a tax” and interpret it as “attacks”. I heard a figure the other day that the UK Tax Office,…