Innovation

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 …

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 …

I don’t usually tell people that I’m a qualified expert in insurance as it’s not relevant, but I’m mentioning it today as I just presented at a private insurance event. There are lots of interesting nuances in insurance. You and I probably think it’s just that once a year renewal …

I now think I am a good friend of Pablo García Arabéhéty, CGAP’s Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. This is, in part, because he’s contributed one of the key pieces I’m using in my new book Digital Human (due for release next Spring), and partly because we met at …

Before 2010, I was writing a lot about technology but it was all heavily geared towards regulations.  It was pretty dull, to be honest, but worthy.  MiFID and PSD were top of mind, along with Basel III and other global, European and domestic regulations.  I wrote a lot about regulations. …

A short time ago, I hosted an interesting group for the Nordic Finance Innovation meetings.  The meeting gathered several of the leading-edge Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) companies that have launched in the last few years including Bud, Clearbank, Leveris, Saxo Bank and Solaris.  Building on each others narrative it soon became clear …

I grew up with America as the dream. However, in the past two decades, China has become the second world superpower, whether the Americans like it or not. This is not me having a love thing for China. It’s just a fact. The Americans don’t like it. Google China as …

For the second time in the last decade, I have been invited as a Contributing Subject Matter Expert to join in research by the World Economic Forum about how technology is changing banking. These are heavyweight projects involving years of research and hundreds of people.  Therefore, I take the content …

I was in a conversation with a bank executive talking about innovation.   We all know the Catch-22 in a bank: you want to be innovative, but only as long as there’s no risk but, with any innovation, there has to be risk.  You can play in the sandbox like little …

I was talking with a few FinTech firms the other day. They are all fully licensed banks, and are less than 15 years old. They all seem to have one thing in common: refreshment. What I mean by this is that they talk about technology in a very different way …

I keep trying to define and delineate more and more of this FinTech Wave. It is no longer FinTech, but PayTech, IDTech, InsurTech, WealthTech, RegTech, GulfTech and more. The thing that strikes me the most is that there are two fundamentally different FinTech camps: those attacking existing business structures and …

I was talking to a group of Treasury folks and the guy before me gave a pitch about the CFO of the future.  The pitch focused upon how the CFO would be managing risk, incorporating different technologies, managing M&A, dealing with globalisation and so on and so forth.  I couldn’t …

Some people talk about FinTech disruption and how payments and banking is being attacked and unbundled by start-ups, but we often look at banking too simplistically. Global banks and investment banks are far more complex creatures than their high street counterparts, which is why we’ve seen far less disruption in …

I was struck by some commentary with John Cryan, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, over on Bloomberg. The article is talking about the wild ride he has had since taking over the helm of the bank which had formerly been run by two CEOs (Juergen Fitschen and Anshu Jain). He …

I really enjoyed a recent article on CGAP (the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor). If you don’t know them, CGAP is a global partnership of over 30 leading organizations that seek to advance financial inclusion. Housed at the World Bank, CGAP’s mission is to improve the lives of poor …