Innovation

The Big Digital Banks: JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs

I was having a chat about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in banking the other day. It was an interesting conversation, although most of the examples were for customer service via Chatbots, which doesn’t impress me much. I know that systems like Erica, short for Bank of AmErica, are up and running to make life easier, but…

To understand banking’s future, it is important to think about its past

I was super impressed by an article written by FinTech friend Bradley Leimer for International Banker the other day, and asked if I could share on the blog. Bradley kindly said yes, so here you are. Enjoy the read! The Invisible Hand of Financial Services by Bradley Leimer, Managing Director and Head of Fintech Strategy, Explorer Advisory…

What FinTech means to banks

There’s a lot of discussion about FinTech and what it means to banks. Originally, everyone was talking about disruption, disintermediation and dissing banks. Then the discussion went to incumbents versus start-ups. Then it ended up last year about partnering and co-creation. I personally believe most of the discussion is off-beam and off-track. For example, there…

Digital banks are 35+ times more productive than traditional banks

I’m launching the new book Digital Human in New York on April 12 (if you want to come, register here), following on from our recent London launch. In London, I was delighted to host Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Bank UK, and Li Wang, Head of Alipay and Ant Financial for EMEA, as panellists to…

If deposit accounts disappear, what will banks do?

I was quite taken by a headline in yesterday’s news where Marcus Schenck, Deutsche Bank’s Co-Head of Corporate and Investment Banking, forecast that deposit accounts might disappear in the not too distant future. He was on a panel at Bloomberg’s European Capital Markets Forum and was asked by an audience member how he was responding to technology…

Ant Financial’s Strategy for AI, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and more

I’ve been flying around a bit and was lucky enough to find myself onstage the other day, chairing the Ant Financial Technology Forum at Money20/20 Singapore. I was honoured to accept to be the moderator of the afternoon and guess I was chosen because Alipay and Ant Financial are a 30,000 word in-depth case study…

How quantum will change everything (including banking, money and security)

I know that we deal with quite complicated things in financial technologies. AI, AGI, ASI (Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial Super Intelligence); machine learning and deep learning; blockchain, shared ledgers and distributed ledger technologies; cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies and digital currencies; Open Banking and Open APIs; and so on and so forth. In fact, the…

bitcoin you say? Bah, humbug!

I’m not saying I’m always right. In fact, I love it when someone points out I’m wrong, and shows me why, because I learn something. So, I was particularly interested when in Sunday’s Guardian, I saw the headline Blockchain: hype or hope. It’s quite a good article, and talks about use cases in voting, provenance…

Making a hash of it

I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share the original data. It’s a little like when I tweet a…