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Jason Butcher, CEO of CoinPayments, posted this picture on LinkedIn the other day: I like it. The roots of innovation are in policies. The core of innovation is in the tree trunk’s technologies. The product of innovation is from enabling policies and technologies. True. Except it doesn’t work that way. The way it really works is…

If you didn’t read my blog last week asking whether the pandemic had transformed banking to be digital forever (answer: no), what is obvious is that the pandemic has changed consumer behaviours forever. This was brought home to me when reading the Forbes-Ipsos survey of American consumers views of digital banking. The survey took place in…

My newest book comes out in June. The theme is the integration of finance, technology and ESG. It’s a subject that has been in the ascendancy for years, but became in vogue in the late 2010s. Now it is a thing. I worry some will therefore think I only came to think about it in…

I’m not sure if anyone noticed but yesterday was the day that Europe voted not to ban bitcoin. It’s been bubbling for a while, as the EU developed a new Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework to protect EU citizens who invest in such assets. In many ways, it’s a good thing as, once a…

I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed a stablecoin using blockchain to enable global payments within Messenger, Instagram and…

This week’s main blog discussions included … Financial sanctions: a reality check Some friends were applauding Visa and MasterCard’s decision to throw Russia off their payments networks over the weekend. Both companies handle 90% of all debit and credit card payments outside of China – and their announcements will deal another significant blow to the Russian…

This BBC article … The remarkable items that have been used as currency … got me thinking about tokenisation. The article discusses the use of shells, specifically the seasnail shell called a cowrie, and how it became a global currency by around 1200BC. Although the cowrie is mainly found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans,…

Thinking about process redesign, I remember when the ATM was invented. I wasn’t there – I’m not that old – but I remember reading about the great debate they had as banks didn’t believe people would be able to remember a PIN. The BBC reports that “Mr. Shepherd-Barron came up with the idea when he realized…

Question: Has retail banking transformed to be digital forever? Answer: No. I’ve always said that banking can never be purely digital as it needs a human touch. It needs the ability to talk to someone as money is the second most important thing in our lives. In fact, for some, it’s the most important thing…

I watch the world through the lens of the network, and have noticed that China is leading the world with digital currencies. The digital yuan is ready for release in time for the winter Olympics and a CBDC is likely to be launched in China before anywhere else. So why are Chinese consumers swapping potatoes…