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  For the past year, there’s been lots of talk about Fintech Unicorns – start-up companies with over a billion dollar valuation launched since 2000.  Jim Bruene at Finovate – register for Finovate Europe with 20% discount using FSClub20 – wrote about so many Fintech unicorns in July 2015, showing the list …

Our main stories of this week includes … Banking becomes a series of components … and loses $1 trillion Some technology trends are highly predictable. One such trend is the modularization of banking, a theme picked up in a new Oliver Wyman report that’s free to coincide with Davos. You can …

One question that crops up regularly is how do we open source the bank, Chris?  The reason is that the bank has built itself over decades through thousands of programmes across hundreds of servers into this massively complex technological spaghetti that cannot be unravelled.  That spaghetti has to be serviced …

Some technology trends are highly predictable. One such trend is the modularization of banking, a theme picked up in a new Oliver Wyman report that’s free to coincide with Davos. You can download the report here, but it’s basically saying something we’ve known since the 1990s: banking is a set …

I was talking with some friends and realised suddenly that we had not talked about branches or branch automation for a long time.  In fact, and this was the dawning, we haven’t talked about branch of the future for a long time. Branch of the future. It’s almost laughable writing …

I was asked the other day about what’s on the CEO’s agenda?  Revenue, restructuring, regulations, share price, bonus, wife, mistress … whoops, sorry, I digress. In fact the four key areas top of mind with most bank CEOs are:

Our main stories of the past two weeks include … 2016 banking predictions That’s not 2,016 banking predictions, which could be good, but banking predictions for the year 2016. Happy New Year. As is usual at the start of the year, I normally make a bunch of predictions about what will …

I was tempted to blog about Bitcoin 3.0 this morning, but Marcus Swanepoel has already done that – news of Bitcoin’s death has been overstated – so I thought I’d blog about robbery instead.  Daylight robbery is far more exciting than investing in the future after all, and there has been …

I’ve been wondering how this year would start and so far the answer seems badly.  What with David Bowie’s death on the same day as I catch man-flu, could it get any worse?  Well yes.  I wake up to the headline: Sell everything ahead of stock market crash, say RBS …

I have a range of technologies I use, but get frustrated with them all. My Apple Watch is redundant, as is my Microsoft Surface, and I upgrade laptop and desktop every 18 months or so, largely to keep up with the demand for speed and reliability.  It could be that …

I wake up today with the usual massive dump of emails, two of which looked a bit suspect.  The first is from DHL, saying my shipment is cancelled.  I don’t use DHL and expect no shipment from them, so delete it.  The second is an email from Transport for London …

There are a lot of Fintech forecasts out there but two of the best I spotted were by David Gyori and Pascal Bouvier, so I decided to take the areas I agree with most to provide a few headline Fintech predictions for 2016 of my own: #1 PayPal will be …

That’s not 2,016 banking predictions, which could be good, but banking predictions for the year 2016. Happy New Year. As is usual at the start of the year, I normally make a bunch of predictions about what will happen in retail, investment and transaction banking … but this year is …

As it’s almost holiday time, I’m going to stop blogging for a while, so here’s the final blog post of 2015 and it’s the ten most read blog posts of 2015.  In at number 10: #10: After the glitch, RBS closes GTS (or how a global bank becomes a national …

Yes, 2015 was the year that the Fintech bubble exploded.  It hasn’t burst yet, but it’s clear that Fintech is the word of 2015.  Everyone is talking unicorns, start-ups, disruption, Fintech and yet this is nothing new.  I often say that I’m only known in the Fintech world because I’ve …