Grid

There are many fintechs I follow closely: Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, Nubank, Ant Group to name just a few. London and the UK in general has been at the centre of all of this, and is home to almost 30 fintech unicorns, with many more rising. The thing is that, as these firms mature, things change….

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the balance between privacy and permission in banking. The fact is that we don’t want people having our account details and yet, on certain occasions, it is necessary. So, what to do? In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, the dichotomy between privacy and permission access has emerged as…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Is fintech young or old? I just received the latest World Economic Forum’s Future of Fintech report so, here’s a summary: The fintech industry is transitioning from rapid expansion into a phase of sustainable growth, increased collaboration and broader market reach. The fintech sector is experiencing a customer growth…

I just received the latest World Economic Forum’s Future of Fintech report so, here’s a summary: The fintech industry is transitioning from rapid expansion into a phase of sustainable growth, increased collaboration and broader market reach. The fintech sector is experiencing a customer growth rate of 37% from 2022-2023, down from 55% in 2020-2021 reflecting a…

Trust in the news services has dropped from 51% to 35% over the last decade, according to Oxford University’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report. The headline paragraph can be summarised as it’s 2025 and we live in a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, climate breakdown and many destructive conflicts around the…

Catching a new report from MIT, there are clear indications that AI is making us stupid. We no longer internalise data and detail, we delegate it. The fact that the Alpha Gen can get all their school reports written by robots and teachers cannot tell the difference, is evidence that this is the way we…

For most of the last decades, I’ve been having arguments about control versus freedom; government versus the individual; the state versus the libertarian. It began in earnest with the launch of bitcoin, where my position is always that you cannot have money without government. Then, as most of you will know, the question is: which…

You may not have spotted it but Jamie Dimon, the CEO and Chair of JPMorgan, who was dressed down in t-shirt and jeans, made a recent appearance at a tech summit on AI organised by Databricks. The 40-minute interview is over here on YouTube, and took the form of a fireside chat with Ali Ghodsi,…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Are you fit to lead your bank if you don’t understand tech? I would love to walk into a bank’s boardroom with my opening slide explaining: “Step confidently into the future of Web3 with Zond, a quantum-resistant Layer-1 blockchain* engineered to transcend today’s security limitations and safeguard your…

Having spent all my life in computing, it’s interesting to look at the development of technology from where it came from to where it is going to. When joining the industry many years ago, we talked about the S/360 instruction set that was the basis of IBM’s systems; we talked about BASIC, Fortran, COBOL and…