History

I was surprised to make a chance discovery about The Wizard of Oz.  The film with Judy Garland is firmly embedded in modern culture as a classic, but did you know that it was a rally call against the financial system when the book was originally written? It as a political, economic and monetary allegory…

Last week marked ten years since the financial crisis hit. On August 9 2007, BNP Paribas froze three of its American funds, the first in a chain of events which would lead to the biggest recession since the Great Depression. These funds were tied to American subprime mortgages and the freeze was the first public…

It’s a decade since the iPhone launched.  Steve Jobs unveiled the new phone on January 9th, 2007. The first iPhones were made available to the grubby hands of the public on June 29th, 2007, exactly ten years ago today.  This was originally just for American consumers with the UK, France, and Germany following in November…

I regularly blog about the same subject, namely CHANGE YOUR CORE SYSTEMS.  Banks do a great job of not listening to me, but that’s because they’ve caught themselves in Catch 22: screwed if I change them and screwed if I don’t.  How did they get into this mess and how can they get out of…

I have no academic papers or historical research view on what I’m about to post, although I will find some, but I was reflecting on my discussions of revolutions in humanity.  In particular, the second age of humankind, when we invented money as a control mechanism. Before this seismic change, money didn’t matter.  We shared beliefs…

From the origins of the internet in 1990, the end of the 1990s saw the emergence of e-commerce and a plethora of payments services and commercial websites.  Then not a great deal happened until the internet became social.  Blog platforms like WordPress and Typepad emerged in 2003; Facebook launched in 2004; and YouTube a year…

Web 1.0 – the network begins As mentioned yesterday, almost half a century of developments in technology led to the launch of the web as we know it today, following Tim Berners-Lee’s paper detailing HTML and URLs.  This was in 1990 and, consequently, the internet morphs almost every decade.  This makes our decade – the…

The last chapter of ValueWeb talks about what comes after the third generation internet: the internet of value.  This is the internet being built today, based upon shared ledgers, cloud, apps, APIs and analytics.  Of course, the next generation is the internet of things.  But what comes after that? There is an answer, but you…

We had a meeting of the Financial Services Club in Oslo last night, talking about the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) and Open APIs (Application Program Interfaces).  It was a fun meeting and covered the in’s and out’s of closed versus open APIs, the implications of allowing Trusted Third Parties (TTPs) access to the bank’s…

I’ve been presenting a summary of Digital Bank and ValueWeb for a few months now.  It is the story of the origins of moneykind and, as many have now heard the story, I thought it’s about time to share this on the blog. If you have half an hour free, then you can watch the presentation.  It’s been filmed…