Innovation

I shared this list of banks that are supposedly the most digital of the large players on twitter the other day: Banco Santander Bank of America Barclays BBVA BNP Paribas Citi DBS Bank Deutsche Bank HSBC JP Morgan Chase RBS Société Générale UniCredit Wells Fargo People came at me, stating that it was a biased…

I just hosted a conference in Africa and you cannot attend a conference in Africa without financial inclusion, mobile wallets and microfinance coming up. It’s always on the agenda and top of mind, because most Africans have been excluded from financial services to date. In particular, focusing upon Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)*, which includes Kenya, Nigeria,…

I was talking the other day to a colleague about the phenomenon in Asia, India, Africa and South America taking place with mobile payments and the lack of take-up in the USA. Why is this, I wondered? Then  got my answer, although it isn’t a singular factor but a combination of factors. First, there are…

I recently wrote this piece for Raconteur’s Sunday Times supplement, and thought it might interest The Finanser’s readers: ‘When we in the West look to America for innovation, we are looking the wrong way’ I often talk about the world of change we are going through and how Europe and America are living in legacy economies Our…

Lots of people talk a good talk about the internet of things and how my washing machine could now make purchases but my question is: what would my washing machine want to buy? More powder and some salt maybe? A replacement for the dish that just broke? An intelligent washing machine buying things on the…

Unless you have been asleep for the last year, you cannot have failed to catch the buzz around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether and Ripple’s XRP. There are even some coins that were created as a joke that are getting significant investments, such as Dogecoin. Dogecoin was created as a way to…

I was sent a nice list of the Top 50 FinTech firms selected by Forbes. They introduce it as follows: Worldwide, $27.4 billion poured into fintech startups in 2017, Accenture reports, up 18% from 2016. With so much in play, it’s not surprising that 22 companies are new on this, the third edition of our list….

Someone made the comment on my platform piece about what happens when there are no Jack Ma’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s, as the whole thing is decentralised? I guess that this is logical as my last line was that government control of cryptocurrencies is “not so easy for cryptocurrencies that have no head office or central…

In my blog yesterday, I talked about the technology titans being liked and potentially trusted with money, but I still don’t think they will open full-service banking. Instead, I think they will focus upon full-service information. The reason I say this is that they don’t want to be banks, it is not core, but they…

I spotted two stories about BBVA that appeared yesterday. The first was in the Financial Times with BBVA Chairman Francisco Gonzalez asking the G20 to take action against the big internet firms, saying “authorities [need] to bring order to this massive change” that could “pose risks to financial stability”. He warns that groups such as…