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I’ve been writing about the war on cash for years. It’s a constant theme that comes up at conferences like SIBOS, and the first time I think I heard the phrase was a Visa presentation back in the 2000s. Back in 2012, I wrote about a Pew report that surveyed a range of experts about mobile…

Related to the end of cities – yesterday’s blog – is the fascinating friction between employers and employees over where to work these days. Some believe you have to come back and work in the office whilst others protest and claim you can work from anywhere, even on the beach. Who is wrong, or are both…

I’ve blogged several times that, as people move to online everything, the retail main street stores and shopping malls are dying. In a similar fashion, bank branches are closing faster than ever and becoming restaurants or coffee houses So, inevitably the question has to come up: what about the post-pandemic City? Bloomberg reports that “oversized…

There have been lots of write-ups about the launch of FedNow which went live last Thursday. FedNow is a real-time payments service for American banks, and gives them 24*7 real-time money transfers throughout its interbank system. Woo-hoo! As Stephany Kirkpatrick, Founder and CEO of Orum, explains on Quora: FedNow is an upcoming instant payment platform…

Always a controversial figure, Anne Boden has hit the headlines again after stepping down as CEO of Starling Bank. Her announcement of remaining on the Board but no longer being the leader of the bank was originally made in May: Boden, who owns 4.9 per cent of the bank she founded in 2014, said she…

This week’s main blog discussions include … Should a bank close a customer’s account because they disagree with their views? From The Times: ‘Until last summer, Nigel Farage had dealt with the same relationship manager at Coutts for years. Then Mark Pierce left for the rival private bank Arbuthnot Latham, and responsibility for the outspoken…

As the Nigel Farage affair rolls on, with resignations and regulations flowing fast, I was struck by one comment in The Financial Times, where a financial analyst said that these changes could prove challenging. “How does it work if a bank is being told ‘we’ll rip your arms if you process money for the wrong people’,…

Seven years after the vote and Britain still feels European whilst not being in European Union. What’s the point of that? In particular, there’s a fair dilemma about regulations in banking in Britain. Should they stay aligned with the EU or go their own way? I guess the more telling question is: what was the…

A while ago, I cited one of the lessons of Doing Digital is that data is the air that we breathe: Data is the new air, and the banks that breathe the best will win (November 2017). Data is not oil, a rare fossil fuel that is finite; data is ever present, ever growing and powering…

For many years now, I have pleaded with bank executives to change. Begged for them to be digital. Prayed that they get the message and transform. Looking back over presentations made in the 2000’s and 2010’s, the message is the same: the leadership team need to ‘get it’. Get what? Get the fact that you…