Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

What’s your point?

This question popped into my head as I’ve asked it before. You need to stand for something or you fall down, But what is your point? Do you ever wonder what your purpose is? I was intrigued by Billie Eilish and Lewis Hamilton presenting at a recent awards ceremony and making comments: “Love you all, but there’s…

What’s the next tech revolution?

I wanted to expand on my theory of a third technology revolution. The first technological revolution was the mainframe. It automated core administrative processing between back and front office. It is the infrastructure that built SWIFT, Visa and MasterCard. It’s the core platform of most banks, with almost half of them running on COBOL mainframe…

Predicting the future: are you mad?

I take pride in how many things I’ve predicted in payments and finance. that have come true from Digital Banking to cloud to BaaS to crypto and more, but I didn’t predict a lot of things, such as the financial crisis of 2008, the sovereign debt crisis that followed and the pandemic that came after…

The Finanser’s Week: 24th November –  30th November 2025

This week’s main discussions include … Those who built our digital world are digging our graves Just stumbled across an update from Stephen Klein, one of the leading voices on LinkedIn. He wrote a fascinating update about how the digital billionaires are insuring themselves for the possible impact of an apocalypse and are spending billions on…

Those who built our digital world are digging our graves

Just stumbled across an update from Stephen Klein, one of the leading voices on LinkedIn. He wrote a fascinating update about how the digital billionaires are insuring themselves for the possible impact of an apocalypse and are spending billions on this. Mark Zuckerberg has spent millions on a compound in Hawaii that covers 1,400 acres. Underground tunnels…

Don’t believe what you see online

I started a theme two years ago, in prep for the next new book, about how we can trust people digitally. In a deep fake world, we cannot. A good example is the Hong Kong staffer who transferred $25m to an account after talking with her deep fake CFO in a video call. The critical…

The problem with subscription services

I really hate subscription services online. There are many that automatically renew without me knowing and, even worse, there are those that you sign up to without even knowing. A good example is one I discovered on my bank account the other day. Apparently I had signed up for a service that costs £3:00 a…

Does your financial provider give you a shallow or deep relationship?

As usual, clicking over LinkedIn, I got a chart that made me sit back and smile a bit. What chart? This one: Source: Brice Groche, LinkedIn The chart outlines the revenue models of Europe’s digital finance firms, and what it made me realise is the big difference in strategies of challenger banks and start-ups. When…

I spit on my bank

Half a century ago, people thought that the average person wouldn’t remember a six-digit PIN*. A quarter century later, we got usernames and passwords by the bucketload. Now, we have so many loads of buckets, each of which are meant to have their own individual access codes, none of which we can remember, that the…

The Finanser’s Week: 17th November –  23rd November 2025

This week’s main discussions include … What is an Intelligent Bank? I keep thinking about what an Intelligent Bank means. What is an Intelligent Bank? Well, strip it back to basics. An Intelligent Bank is a bank that is so embedded and intimate with my digital finance that it can predict what I should do,…