Grid

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 …

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 …

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 EY failed to ask for Wirecard bank …

There are lots of ways in which FinTech is changing the world, and the one we love to discuss the most is financial inclusion. The figures stun me. Over a billion people have been banked in the last decade, according to the World Bank. 69 percent of adults – 3.8 …

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. Alessandro then goes on to cite the key things that banking …

Forbes just launched a list of the world’s best banks, based upon a survey of over 40,000 consumers in partnership with Statista. I’m always wary of such surveys as, like influencer lists, they often reflect the world they want and miss a lot of what’s really happening. Nevertheless, there are some …

I got hauled up the other day by someone who thought I was very insensitive in blogging about this crisis as an economic one, but not a catastrophic one. What I actually wrote was (I’ve amended it slightly since): Someone wrote the other day that this pandemic is like a world …

The main blog headlines are … This is no Black Swan (Part Two) I was having a bit of ding-dong over my article about the coronavirus pandemic being perfectly predictable and not a black swan. There are many who believe the reaction to the pandemic is a black swan, as …

I was sitting and thinking that I’ve been a bit negative in my recent posts. I don’t like being negative as I’m an optimist. So I determined that today I must write a cheerful story … whoops! failed. Instead, I woke up to the news that a young man had …

I was having a bit of ding-dong over my article about the coronavirus pandemic being perfectly predictable and not a black swan. There are many who believe the reaction to the pandemic is a black swan, as in the lockdown of Planet Earth. Hmmm … what reaction did we think …

I’m a simple guy. I don’t trade or invest much. That may seem surprising for a FinTech guy, but most of what I’ve invested in seems to lose value. As a result, I collect rare comics instead as Batman, Spiderman and Ironman are forever. That being said, I do follow …

Sitting at home, as usual, and thinking about life, I realised that my blogs were becoming far more personal and revealing than usual. I don’t post a lot of them, as I think they are too personal and revealing, but it made me realise that this crisis and lockdown has …

Like many, I’ve watched 2020 unfold with a mixture of shock and horror. It began with Australian bushfires followed rapidly by the coronavirus pandemic and now the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. My real shock was that there could be so many global demonstrations during a major global lockdown. Do rules …

The main blog headlines are … Are banks too full of testosterone? There’s no logical reason for this, but I’ve decided the second week of June is women’s week. It’s a week to celebrate diversity, or the lack of diversity, in finance and technology. So, this week’s blogs are all …

In a final perspective around women and technology and finance, I welcome the thoughts of Ron Shevlin, the snark himself. In a recent article on Forbes, Ron wrote about what women want from banking. The research his company Cornerstone produced some interesting results. Enjoy … The Four Things Women Want …