Grid

A natural thought is that if you’re smart, you’re more likely to be rich, but that’s not true. There are many smart people who are poor and many stupid people who are rich. Why so? Because wealth has nothing to do with intelligence. A study published in November 2016 in the Proceedings of the National Academy…

I’ve been looking at where we are in 2022, compared with 2012. In 2012, everyone was talking about FinTech disrupting and destroying the dinosaur banks; in 2022, banks are buying FinTechs and even launching their own start-up FinTechs Things have changed. I blogged a while ago about the phases of FinTech we’re going through, and can…

One of my good friends is Felix Hamilton, who is based in Hong Kong. This is the city that recently had a meltdown, due to government regulation removing many citizen’s rights. It is also a city that is meant to be a global financial and FinTech hub, but this does not seem so likely as…

Back in 2015, I interviewed Nikolas Adalberth, a co-founder of Swedish FinTech unicorn Klarna. Little did I know back then that they would be of the biggest stars of FinTech and the creators of BNPL, the Buy Now Pay Later, revolution Is it a revolution? Not really. It’s just another form of credit, but people like…

This week’s main blog discussions include … How Facebook failed at finance I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed…

Jason Butcher, CEO of CoinPayments, posted this picture on LinkedIn the other day: I like it. The roots of innovation are in policies. The core of innovation is in the tree trunk’s technologies. The product of innovation is from enabling policies and technologies. True. Except it doesn’t work that way. The way it really works is…

If you didn’t read my blog last week asking whether the pandemic had transformed banking to be digital forever (answer: no), what is obvious is that the pandemic has changed consumer behaviours forever. This was brought home to me when reading the Forbes-Ipsos survey of American consumers views of digital banking. The survey took place in…

My newest book comes out in June. The theme is the integration of finance, technology and ESG. It’s a subject that has been in the ascendancy for years, but became in vogue in the late 2010s. Now it is a thing. I worry some will therefore think I only came to think about it in…

I’m not sure if anyone noticed but yesterday was the day that Europe voted not to ban bitcoin. It’s been bubbling for a while, as the EU developed a new Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework to protect EU citizens who invest in such assets. In many ways, it’s a good thing as, once a…

I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed a stablecoin using blockchain to enable global payments within Messenger, Instagram and…