Innovation

I’m boarding a flight yesterday and murfing (mobile surfing).  Flicking between Facebook apps, twitter, bank account, BBC news and more.  Suddenly I spot a new ICO – Initial Coin Offering – for a new bank.  From Wikipedia: “An initial coin offering (ICO) is a means of crowdfunding the release of a new cryptocurrency. Generally, tokens for the new cryptocurrency are…

I was invited to talk to some City folks about using data analytics for trading.  It made me pause for reflection, as I’ve been talking about analytics for trading for a long, long time.  Twenty years ago in fact. Back in the 1990s, we were taking about object oriented programming, neural networking for stock picking…

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 recently hosted Nick Ogden, the founder of WorldPay and serial entrepreneur, at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings in Stockholm and Oslo.  Nick is now launching the first new UK clearing bank for over 250 years called ClearBank.  I’d heard a few rumblings about ClearBank, but hadn’t really go the message until I saw him…

Someone made an interesting comment about Google this week: banks can attack Google’s soft underbelly. What? Google? Soft underbelly? And banks can attack it? You must be joking. The presenter (Conor McAleavey, Chief Innovatoin Officer with Leveris) went on to outline what he meant and, as he talked about it, I thought there may be…

I saw a really interesting presentation in Kigali at the Dot Finance Africa FinTech Summit from Yasaman Hadjibashi, Chief Creation Officer with Barclays Africa (soon to be something else). She began with a discussion of the make-up of Africa: By 2050, it is expected that the population will double from 1.2 billion today to 2.4 billion…

Expanding on yesterday’s discussion of how MNOs are sweeping up business for the underbanked and unbanked, Igor Pesin of Life.SREDA posted a lovely update giving even more detail.  Here is how he saw things … Fintech in Rwanda: the place where Telcos are surpassing Banks in the financial sector Telcos dominate in the financial sector…

During the discussions at Dot Finance Africa, there was a very interesting dialogue about the mobile network operators (MNOs), with panels featuring Airtel and M-PESA.  It was interesting to hear them talking directly about how they focus upon the customer experience and their singular objective of convenience.  Both MNOs talked about customer convenience.  The convenience…

I often think we need a reality check when it comes to digital finance.  Many of the pundit analysts and influencers out there believe no one needs a branch visit and that everything can be done remotely on devices.  I don’t.  I’ve mentioned this many times and, psychologically, customers need the reassurance that they can…