Innovation

At the conference I attended the other day, one speaker highlighted some InsurTech I’d not seen before but thought pretty cool. It’s a prototype service from Direct Line called Fleetlights. Fleetlights is an army of drones that light up the night skies and are designed to help people in difficult …

I was chairing a panel with a number of different players, one of which was Monzo. Simon Vans-Colina, Monzo’s lead engineer for Open APIs, was talking about their approach to partnering with others in an API ecosystem, including TransferWise and Investec Bank. What was not surprising is that the lion’s …

As I travel around, I find different cultures fascinating Some are open, some are closed; some are welcoming, some are distrusting; some feel comfortable, some feel weird; some feel nice, some feel strict; and so on. A lot of the feeling you have about a country is a mixture of …

I grew up as a marketing guy. My first career roles were in marketing. I was trained by Kotler and Drucker, and still hold true to first principles of marketing: the 4 P’s or, if you’re not a marketing person, product, price, place and promotion. This is the original marketing …

I keep seeing headlines about Amazon opening a bank, challenger banks pulling the crown off the incumbent banks heads, the end of old banks, the disruption of the system and the end of all traditional financial services. I guess some would say that I fall into this camp and, on …

One other thing struck me as the discussions fired away in Shanghai at Lang Di … is China going to haemorrhage and bring down the world’s financial systems … or is that just what the Western media would like us to think? The reason I raise it is that I …

I’ve been thinking for a while now about building a new financial system from the ground up using AI, blockchain, the Internet of Everything and other technologies. What would it look like? What would we build? I guess the piece that inspired a lot of my thinking came from two …

A common response to technology is to test it. The problem with testing technology is that it is just a test. A false implementation. It is not designed for reality and can lead to false results. For example, I remember one UK bank testing new technologies in one branch, to …

If you didn’t catch the big news of yesterday, it was the first public firing of a robot. In this case, a bank’s chatbot, Amelia. Amelia was launched last year by Swedish bank Nordnet, with the aim of speeding up customer onboarding and improving customer satisfaction. Apparently, she achieved neither …

Conservative MP Eddie Hughes has just written a 36-page white paper extolling the benefits of blockchain for Britain, which was published yesterday Unlocking Blockchain: Embracing new technologies to drive efficiency and empower the citizen, by FREER. FREER is a major new initiative from the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA, a …

You may have seen that Ticketmaster just announced that thousands of customers worldwide may have been affected by a hack. If you didn’t here’s the low-down (via ABC News) The company said its British business, Ticketmaster UK, identified malicious software on a customer support product which was hosted by a …

I bet you were wondering why I hadn’t written an Ant update recently. Well, I thought it was getting too much … but then I just arrived in Hong Kong and the hotel has kindly given me a copy of Fortune magazine with the headline cover page talking about the …

I keep asking dumb questions like: if the tech giants give away payments, lending and credit for free, how will banks make money? As I’ve regularly blogged, the tech giants don’t want to get into banking per se, but they do want to encourage more traction through their platform by …

I sometimes think I’m too harsh on the financial community, with my continual banter about core systems change, lack of digital leadership, inability to see how critical digital is to their future and the impact FinTech is making on global financial structures. I sound like a broken record and rarely …

We know that there are lots of new bank start-ups out there, particularly in Europe where names like N26, Bunq, Fidor and Monzo stand out. In particular, the UK’s Monzo bank is notable. It is notable for a variety of reasons – the fastest crowdfunding of a new bank, the …