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OK, OK, OK. I said this blog is not political, but it’s got a bit that way this week after my comments on HSBC and Standard Chartered, China and Hong Kong. In fact, I feel I’ve opened a bag of hornets and therefore I’m not going to continue this theme further … but do feel…

I got an amazing reply to my post yesterday. I cannot say from whom – that’s part of the thing – but it’s such a good reply, I’m sharing it here. For me, it shows how the internet has changed the world – I can write a blog from Poland, get a reply from Hong…

I keep saying that I don’t want to be political on this blog – I’m not qualified and it’s not why you read it – but, as a human being, I cannot ignore things like Black Lives Matter, the lockdown approaches of different countries, the suppression of religious groups, the wars that continue (especially in…

The main blog headlines are … The Wirecard fiasco: Wirecard or Weirdcard? Another day and another headline about Wirecard: ‘The money’s gone’: Wirecard collapses owing $4 billion Wirecard’s Missing Billions Forces Out CEO, Panics Lenders Wirecard: Former boss arrested over €1.9bn scandal How Wirecard fooled most of the people all of the time Inside Wirecard…

I guess this week must be the week where I’ve found a lot of useful free research, as here’s another one. This time from Genpact, “a global professional services firm delivering digital transformation”. Some interesting stats in this report: In 2018, the world’s largest 1,000 banks held 12% more tier-1 capital than in 2017, the…

I only just stumbled across this 124 page report from McKinsey and, building on yesterday’s free research from Deloitte, this report is all about digital transformation and replacing core systems, my favourite subject. Here’s the intro: Next-gen Technology transformation in Financial Services Financial Services technology is currently in the midst of a profound transformation, as…

I recently did a podcast and webinar with the Institute for International Finance (IIF). The timing was great because they’ve just produced a set of three reports about digital transformation in partnership with Deloitte. I can thoroughly recommend the three reports so here they are: Realizing the Digital Promise: Part 1 Realizing the Digital Promise:…

During my MoneyBox interview about Wirecard (see end of this blog), Paul asked me the question: how could this happen again? What’s next? And I said, we learn from our mistakes. Progress never stops. Wirecard won’t shut down FinTech. It will amend it. This means this is not the end of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), but an…

Some of us are old enough to remember Arthur Anderson and Enron, a mixture of two companies that created an accounting mess bigger than any seen before in corporate history. That was until Ernst & Young (EY) and Wirecard. Interestingly, there have been many auditing mess ups in the past few decades, but there are…

The main blog headlines are … Is FinTech getting it wrong? Focus on needs and wants A friend of mine, Alessandro Hatami, wrote an interesting piece on Sifted that I shared in my news yesterday. He claims that neobanks like Monzo and Starling are not reinventing banking at all. They’re just modifying and improving it….