Innovation

I need to shut up about Ant Group, as I’ve blogged a lot about them lately. However, with an IPO coming up and news coming out daily almost, it’s hard to ignore some of their activities. One activity that really hit me when it was released in July was the rebranding of all of their…

This week’s blogs are inspired by our global connector Marisol Menendez This week is a bit different on the blog as I’m going to introduce you to one of my other businesses: Nordic Future Innovation. Nordic Future Innovation (originally Nordic Finance Innovation) is a venture I  started almost ten years ago with Iren Tranvag. We began in…

Over the past week or two, the neobank and challenger bank sector has been issuing financial reports. If you haven’t noticed: WHERE WERE YOU? Monzo got a particular hammering for warning that the coronavirus pandemic could impact the company as a going concern. Some argue this is just accounting and auditing speak to warn of…

I was having a chat with someone the other day and lamenting the loss of open travel. My job was reliant on travel, going to conferences worldwide as a keynote speaker. Locked up at home: (a) how am I going to generate keynotes at conferences that don’t exist; and (b) how am I going to…

I’ve seen a few big deals signed this month to get banks onto the cloud, such as National Australia Bank (NAB) switching to Microsoft’s Azure, and Deutsche Bank moving to the Google Cloud. McKinsey expect that cloud usage will rise from less than a quarter of banks business being cloud-based to anything between 40 and 90…

I blog regularly about what a fanboy I am of Chinese technology giants Alibaba and Tencent. It’s getting a bit ridiculous now however, when payments companies are designing payments for cats and dogs … or maybe it’s not … it’s just an extension of technologies that work for humans. My last blog on this subject…

When The Financial Times does what they’re good at – covering financial markets and not technology – then they do produce some fascinating content. Case in point is the latest coverage of JPMorgan Chase’s (JPMC) 2019 results. The bank’s latest results are stunning, with the fourth-quarter profit soaring to $8.52 billion or $2.57 a share….

Really interesting interview here with Ana Botin, Executive Chair of Santander, on Bloomberg. It starts with talking about how Santander can make a difference on climate change with Ana claiming that the bank is voted the most sustainable bank in the world. But when the interviewer, Erik Schatzker, asks her how Santander is making a…

I just saw an interesting report produced and released by SIX Group that talks about the future of money.  SIX Group run payments and settlement processing out of Switzerland and, unsurprisingly, their view is that the most likely future is that there will be digital everything but still some cash around. My own view is…