Grid

As mentioned last week, the House of Lords gathered a number of leading people to discuss blockchain and its potential to develop a digital currency for the UK.  Brave New Coin summarises the whole affair nicely, and I want to keep this for the record, so have copied their update …

I was having a debate yesterday where a bank executive was asking me about what the hottest things in FinTech are right now.  My answer was machine learning (AI) and blockchain.  There are others such as contextual commerce, voice recognition and digital assistants, but machine learning and blockchain are top …

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you may have noticed the rise of Pokémon Go.  It’s been in the news everywhere, mainly because kids seem to be gathering in places they shouldn’t.  Equally, the game has been responsible for everything from finding dead bodies to resurrecting other ones.   Mayhem …

Friend of the Financial Services Club and journalist with Financial News Anna Irrera has recently started producing a weekly roundup of FinTech news.  She’s kindly agreed to let me republish this summary here on The Finanser, so here goes: Hello everyone, Fintech things you should know: UBS appointed a new head of …

As mentioned, ANZ are happy keeping their 40-year-old version of a system – why does that always remind me of some movie title – and I have decided to shut up about this after one last blog update.  This one is a final piece of perspective to this whole discussion, and …

I tried to make some allowance for ANZ running a 40-year-old core system yesterday, by pointing to the fact that people are slow to change and there may well be no compelling reason to switch a legacy system. Even though I’ve tried to make the case many times: Banks with …

I talked about the legacy problem yesterday and, in reality, the problem isn’t just the legacy system. It’s the legacy people and legacy customer. The legacy people are the ones who sit in the organisation and resist change. They know where their cheese is and they don’t want it to …

Well I couldn’t let this one go by without commenting on it.  A regular theme in the blog is get rid of old technology if it’s running core systems.  The reason is that systems designed before Mark Zuckerberg was born are surely not fit for purpose in this day and …

The Bright Future The year is 2030.  Europe grows from strength to strength, after the harmonisation agreements between the German Finance Minister, the European Central Bank and the European Parliament for the clearance for Quantitative Easing and bailout funds for Italy in 2018.  This was a turning point in the …

I can remember a few years ago that the UK pound was almost at the level of being valued at $2.  Two dollars to the pound.  Amazing.  I brought a lot of American stuff that year.  Yesterday, I bought something and it was $1.30 to the pound.  Shoot.  The dinner …

When someone sends me something interesting, I can’t help but share it so this insight from Susan Visser came at just the right moment.  Susan and I have exchanged various ideas over the years, so here’s her view of the key Fintech trends. Summary Data is having a tremendous impact on customer …

I sat through a discussion of FinTech last night.  The theme was how FinTech is changing the business model of banking and a bunch of bankers focused upon the issue.  From the dialogue, there were clearly four big buckets of change: Regulations and how they impact the incumbents and the …

I’ve published a few summaries of the best of blockchain research earlier this year (February and March).  There’s been a load more since, but Brave New Coin has curated a nice summary of all those that came out in the last quarter.  As they publish my content sometimes, here is their list (click on the …

We spend much of our time berating the banks and beating them up, but it’s not always the case.  Every now and again, I like to write about the specific good that banks do.  For example, 5 of the top 10 Charitable Companies in the USA are banks: Wells Fargo …

Friend of the Financial Services Club and journalist with Financial News Anna Irrera has recently started producing a weekly roundup of FinTech news.  She’s kindly agreed to let me republish this summary here on The Finanser, so here goes: Once upon a time it was all blockchain!blockchain!blockchain!…Now it’s all brexit!brexit!brexit!  Fintech lobby …