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I’ve been lucky. I got my first job just after a massive economic crisis and haven’t really been exposed to one since. I live in a bubble that has never had a war. I have never been in a country with double-digit inflation, during my working life. What that means is that I’ve never really…

After all the turbulence of the crypto winter, things seem to have bottomed out and a mini-rally is underway. Keep that in mind as you can see from the comments and stats that a lot of people think that crypto is here to stay, regardless of the recent dip. Buy the dip? Maybe or maybe…

A corporate treasurer reached out to me in his frustration over the forced move from MT to MX messaging, saying it’s going to going to cost €500,000 or more for most corporates to comply with just one of the required changes not including the full development cost of a new file format. That may seem…

UK Finance recently released its latest fraud report for 2021. The report shows a total of over £1.3 billion was stolen. Unauthorised fraud was £730.4 million and authorised push payment (APP) fraud was £583.2 million, with nearly 40% of APP losses due to impersonation scams. The banking and finance industry prevented a further £1.4 billion of unauthorised…

A PR firm reached out to me the other day, saying: want to hear about a FinTech firm started on a farm? I said yes and, before I knew it, Stable became my new, favourite FinTech start-up. It meant that I soon hooked up in a conversation with the firm’s founder, Rich Counsell. Here’s our chat: Chris…

This week’s main blog discussions include … #HSBC’s two-face strikes again We had quite a few discussions around FinTech Week London and the line that seemed to catch people’s attention is: we must remove legacy thinking. There was debate about examples of legacy thinking. We need branches for advice; customers will always need cash (and…

I shared a post the other day: It inspired FinTech friend and colleague Efi Pylarinou to write a post about it. Efi has kindly allowed me to share the post with you here … Beware of powerful and ambitious Tigers amongst Big VCs We are in the 6th month of the Water Tiger Year and…

Back in the day, a number of books were key to my management thinking. Books by Peter Drucker, James Champy and Michael Hammer, Ricardo Semler, Michael Treacy, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, and more. All of these books were about changing businesses to be customer focused, and one of the…

We had quite a few discussions around FinTech Week London and the line that seemed to catch people’s attention is: we must remove legacy thinking. There was debate about examples of legacy thinking. We need branches for advice; customers will always need cash (and checks!); only regulated markets by governments work; banks can only do…

We had a great discussion about Open Payments, Open Banking and Open Finance at FinTech Week London* this week. What was interesting is that nearly everyone opened with a mention of customer and customer journeys. Customer is the critical factor here, and customers don’t care whether they’re using Open Finance or not. What they care…