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I’ve said for years that MasterCard has the wrong name. Cards are so last century. This century is all about the chip, so MasterCard should be renamed MasterChip. For the first time the other day, I found a banker who agrees with me. Reuters reports that Brazil’s central bank chief Roberto Campos Neto said he believes…

Inspired by an article by Ilias Louis Hatzis, and my recent musings around a cashless world, I wondered what privacy is these days? What is private? Are we bothered about privacy? I guess many have let their guard down about privacy this century as, when everything is online, we no longer have any. We allow…

I was recently presenting in Brazil, and did a fair bit of research and networking about the FinTech scene there. The biggest story is Nubank, parent company Nu, the challenger bank that’s become one of the biggest and brightest in the world. Valued at close to $50 billion when they IPO’d in December 2021, the…

I got into a debate about my blog from Friday about money creating inequality, and how the future of space and sci-fi would have no money. I guess this resonates with most of my writing from discussing Metropolis – one of my favourite films, along with its many successors such as Hunger Games and In…

This week’s main blog discussions include … In space, no one can take your money The strapline for the film Alien was that in space, no one can hear you scream. It doesn’t sound quite as scary, but I was thinking about the cashless world and realised that: In case you cannot see the words:…

The strapline for the film Alien was that in space, no one can hear you scream. It doesn’t sound quite as scary, but I was thinking about the cashless world and realised that: In case you cannot see the words: In space, no one can take your money Do you ever see anyone paying for…

I tweeted the other day how many places are now cashless. This is definitely true in most Northern European countries. In Poland, I haven’t used a banknote for two years or more. In the UK, I went to the theatre and they told me they wouldn’t take my banknote (by law, they have to, but…

I just had an interesting and lengthy dialogue. After booking flights a while ago, the flight operator cancelled one leg of my flight. Instead of flying to Las Vegas for five nights via Frankfurt, I was now flying to Las Vegas for two nights and then back to my layover city Frankfurt for three nights….

I’ve felt European for most of my life, as the UK joined the EU back in 1973. Free travel and movement across borders, that grew from nine states to twenty eight, introduced a glorious period of open integration. Integration of trade and commerce and then, latterly, money and finance. The grand plan of the euro…

The last recession of any major size was 2008. Fourteen years ago! The iPhone had just appeared and we had just started discussions around the concept of cloud computing. Oh, and FinTech wasn’t even talked about. Fourteen years later, FinTech is getting over $200 billion investment a year, and the world has changed a lot….