Humour

Another musing whilst on holiday is that it is difficult to get into the head of a twenty- or thirty- something millennial when you’re a Gen X or Baby Boomer. In my head, I still think I’m 20 but, when I look in the mirror, I know I’m not. This thought struck me as I…

I had a realisation the other day: banks are brilliant. Everyone says they hate banks, but I love them. In fact, I think most people secretly love their bank. They just don’t like to admit it. After all, when did you last change your bank? Not open another bank account, but actually switch your main…

There are two big tech topics in banking these days, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain. These two tech titans are changing the back office of banks into intelligent shared structures that will be mind-blowing a decade from now. In fact, they’re not far off that today. I’ve written a lot about Blockchain, and feel…

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…

A long time ago, a man would go to work whilst the woman would stay at home. Thanks to a generation of change, women and men now work and no one has to stay at home. A long time ago, work was a place you went to and home was a place you rested.  Thanks…

I find it amusing to think about this age of self-service, where we take it for granted that it’s cheaper, easier and more personalised to your own wishes if you book it yourself.  And, for most of the time, that works well.  Except when you mess things up, like booking non-refundable flights on the wrong…

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 hosted a banking dinner the other night, where we were talking about the FinTech scene in this particularly vibrant and innovative country.  It was under the Chatham House Rule, so I can’t say too much about who and where this dinner was, but it did amuse me half way through when we were talking…

I was really interested in a presentation by Benny Boye Johansen, Head of OpenAPI at Saxo Bank, at our recent Nordic Finance Innovation meetings.  In particular, he put up some slides that were both illuminating, amusing and strange.  They were Google Trends charts looking at Payments API, PSD2 and Open Banking. Google trends tracks the…