Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

This week’s FU!

In our final FU before Christmas, we made it a jolly one and, before you watch this week’s show, how about a little quiz for yourself? The fastest growing service ever launched achieved over a million users in five days. Who or what is it? Central banks cannot go bankrupt. However what made the Belgian…

The future of money, according to Vitalik Buterin

What excites Vitalik Buterin (Mr. Ethereum)? Vitalik Buterin is the leading thinker around smart contracts and blockchain, as well as being the inventor of ETH, the currency, and Ethereum, the platform. A really bright guy and always worth a listen. So, I was interested in his latest blog about the future of where all this…

The whole point of money is to NOT know your customer

I really did not want to write about this article on the ECB’s website but, after so much coverage (including our discussion on this week’s FU), I feel I have to. So, the ECB say bitcoin is irrelevant. Why? Well, on the back of the collapse of Terra-Luna, Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, FTX, BlockFi and more,…

Welcome ChatGPT … should Google be worried?

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a log this week, you must have heard all the buzz about ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an OpenAI place where almost any question you have in your head can be answered. The reason it’s got such a buzz is that within just a week of launch, there are over a million…

FinTech Schadenfreude?

People took great delight in telling me how some of the big FinTech trade shows this year appeared to be lots of struggling FinTech firms holding out begging bowls to banks. Many start-ups are struggling, with their cash runway running out, and they desperately need funding and investment. The banks are smiling and feeling that…

How about a future life living on a ship?

When you are super rich and ultra-high net worth, what’s the next step? Houses in every continent? A private jet? Or an apartment on a cruise ship that allows you to claim non-residency in every country of the world … and therefore zero tax status globally? The latter seems to be the most popular, which…

The Finanser’s Week: 28th November – 4th December 2022

This week’s main blog discussions include … The Crypto House of Cards Building on Friday’s blog, everyone is asking whether the house of crypto is falling apart like a house of cards. People are saying that Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and faller at FTX, was running a Ponzi scheme. What is the definition of a…

This week’s FU!

Before you watch this week’s show on the biggest, most controversial and WTF stories of #fintechuncut, candid commentary on the biggest #Fintech and #FinancialServices stories of the week that was, how about a little quiz for yourself? The European Commission predicted something or someone to be on the road of irrelevance. Who or what is it? Never waste a…

Modern Life

My energy bills have shot up, like most peoples, so I rang the energy firm. I was greeted by you are 193rd in the queue. This didn’t sound good. After two and a half hours the phone was picked up. My bill doesn’t seem right, have you taken a reading? I asked. No, but the…

Dealing with a recession

FinTech began in the 2000’s and was fuelled by new technologies – cloud computing and the smartphone in particular – alongside the failing of traditional finance when the financial crisis hit in 2008. Now that we enter a global recession, FinTech has a new challenge: dealing with no investors in a time when they need…