Innovation

Why are most bank brands just acronyms? I know it’s a silly question, as banks are acronyms because who wants to say John Pierpont Morgan Chase when it’s easier just to say JPM, but it is endemic to banking that banks are acronyms. I was just writing down a few: HSBC, SCB, OCBC, DBS, ICICI,…

We hosted ePassi at our recent launch of Nordic Finance Innovate (NFI) in Helsinki, Finland. ePassi are the partner firm of Alipay, bringing the app to Finland to allow Chinese tourists to pay easily when travelling via Finland to Europe. It’s been very successful as it was initially launched to allow tourists to come and…

I was at a large bank’s wealth management conference recently, where the CEO was being quizzed about various areas including a lot about technology and FinTech. He made several statements that I noted with interest: “Roboadvisory services improves our speed-to-market and human productivity, but does not replace humans. In particular, I can see that artificial…

I’ve blogged on some of the themes I’m going to cover below, but the story gets clearer and clearer in my head the more I blog about and talk about it, so this version may be a little clearer than some that have gone before. The first is that banks organisational structures have to move…

I get lots of input from many sources, and one of the ones I like is the innovation survey of banking produced annually by EFMA with Accenture. It also usually proves to be one of the most read items on my blog – here’s the 2015 and 2016 reports – so, as I know you like it…

I’ve said continually that firms like Google and Amazon will never open a bank. I still believe that this will be the case – Facebook and Apple also fall into this view – and mainly hold this view because these companies would find full service banking a difficult and unprofitable space. In fact, I’ve blogged…

I was asked to explain what I meant by haven’t central bankers realised that democratised trust is in the technologies and code? when I blogged about the regulator’s views on bitcoin the other day. I wasn’t going to answer, but then have been prompted to do so after attending the Blockchain Live conference in London….

I mentioned the Lego Bank not built by Lego recently. It’s all about the Open Marketplace of apps, APIs and analytics, and I said that the idea was illustrated well by firms like Solaris, Clear.bank and Bud. Just to follow on from that, here is a series of video interviews we recorded during the meetings about…

As part of the blockchain conference, I chaired a session with some central bankers talking about their views on distributed ledger technologies. These central banks have run trials and are thinking about it, but none of them are particularly big on blockchain right now. As mentioned on Friday, they see it as a long-term development…

I’m making a presentation on cybersecurity this week at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings. This meant preparing a few new slides from scratch as I don’t have a set deck for cybercrime, and sat and started ideas just as the news dropped about the Equifax breach. You’ll all know about this by now, but over…