I try to generally avoid making political commentary on the blog as it’s not appropriate. This is a blog about technology and finance, not the economy and politics. Every now and again the two come together such as with Brexit and Donald Trump. Equally sometimes they cannot be avoided as …
Read More »A disruptive innovation appears
I was listening to a financier talking about FinTech the other day, and claiming that they are all sustaining innovations and not disruptive. They were referring to Clayton Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma discussions, where Professor Christensen points to different markets that were destroyed by disruptors. Those markets include the American car …
Read More »Neobanks don’t need to be “real banks” to compete in banking
I wrote a piece recently about the challenges of being a challenger bank. It coincided with the news that my friends at solarisBank had just achieved a Series A funding round of €26 million. Neatly, co-founder of solarisBank Marko Wenthin spotted my post and decided to send a reply. Here is …
Read More »Turkish delights in innovation
I’ve been working closely with BKM, the Turkish retail payments clearing company, for a few years now. They manage the Fintech Istanbul program, and are the powerhouse behind many of the innovations we’ve seen in Turkey from mobile wallets to contactless payments. Their CEO, Soner Canko, will be presenting to …
Read More »The largest payments company in the world that most people have never heard of
I blogged a year ago about TechFin, the incumbents’ view of applying technology to existing banking services, versus FinTech which seeks to transform the financial system. That has become one of the top search terms to find my blog, as it turns out, mainly because my blog entries are the first …
Read More »When will banks stop seeing financial inclusion as charity?
I was asked this question at a recent conference and yes, banks do believe that the mass poor are just that: poor. How do you make a profit out of the poor? Well, truth be told, the poorest are the most profitable. They’re the ones who need loans and go …
Read More »57 banks and nothing wrong?
Seven years ago, the first new retail bank in almost a century got its licence to open: Metro Bank. Now, there are so many new banks starting up in Britain (and across Europe) that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with it all. There are app-only start-up banks (Atom, Monzo, Starling, Tandem); foreign …
Read More »Counterparty payments in seconds is an easy sell
It made me laugh today. I was chairing a panel where Romana Kumar, Head of Global Transaction Banking for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), was discussing their trial of Ripple. The background to this was announced in a press release on 1st February 2017: Ripple’s Distributed Financial Technology …
Read More »An interview with Tom Blomfield, co-founder of Monzo
The first job Tom Blomfield (left in photo) ever had was delivering leaflets for estate agent Wilson Heal. He lasted one day in the cold December rain before convincing the guys that leaflets were old school and they really needed a website, which Tom then built and still exists today. …
Read More »web 5.0, the 2030s and Samantha
There’s a line in the 2013 film Her, it’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness. The film is about Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Theodore is a lonely writer who gets to trial a new operating system OS1, the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system. The OS1 tailors …
Read More »Who needs a financial centre?
For ten years, my friends cover at Z/Yen have been producing the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), on behalf of the City of London. It’s a research program where people can answer the survey questionnaire and, from those participating, the different cities of the world vying to be financial hubs are …
Read More »The biggest innovations in retail banking (research)
OK, OK, OK, I promise to stop posting predictions and trends and blah, blah, blah, but this one has an interesting provenance and history. Last year, one of my most read blog entries was this one: The top ten trends in banking innovation (February 2016). This was a summary of the top …
Read More »The Catch 22 of Banking
I realised the other day that financial markets are confused. On the one hand, we spend all of our time criticising banks for being slow to change, inflexible, lacking customer focus and being greedy and, in some cases, fraudulent; on the other, many reckon that challenger banks are not that …
Read More »2017 – a decisive year for retail payment services in Europe
In case you missed it, there was an important keynote speech by Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at a conference in France last Friday. It has some key announcements in there, so I’m reproducing the speech here for those interested in immediate payments and what …
Read More »Two mainstream blockchain developments already
So one of my 2017 forecasts is coming true already: it is the year that blockchain moves out of proofs of concept and work and into the mainstream. Two great examples broke out this week from skunk works to media. The first I spotted was the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) …
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