Shaping the future of finance
Apparently, artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. Well, maybe, because this is no longer just a warning coming from science-fiction writers or people standing outside Silicon Valley carrying placards. Some of the people building the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems are openly discussing the possibility that the technology they are creating could…
The FinTech Book Club recently devoted its discussion to my latest book Intelligent Bank, and the overall reaction was strongly positive. That was a relief as I’m a good friend of these guys, but that does not make them biased. All views are their own and independent and objective. The reviewers are leading fintech experts…
Digital money doesn’t have a passport. For millenia, money has been organised around geography. The dollar belongs to America, sterling to Britain, the euro to Europe and the yen to Japan. Banks are licensed nationally, central banks provide national monetary anchors, governments guarantee deposits nationally and regulators supervise institutions largely through national legal frameworks. Digital…
I’ve recently written quite a bit about the GENIUS Act, the GRANITE Act and the CLARITY Act in the United States. Well, yesterday was the crucial day as the CLARITY Act moved through the Senate or, rather, it didn’t. The USA has spent years arguing that cryptocurrency needs regulatory clarity and the Digital Asset Market…
Over the past two days, I have looked separately at two uncomfortable developments in banking. The first is that banks are moving more and more of their critical infrastructure onto a handful of global cloud platforms, while the second is that artificial intelligence is moving from helping humans make decisions towards making those decisions itself….
We spent the years after the financial crisis worrying about banks that were too big to fail. We forced them to hold more capital, more liquidity, write living wills, run stress tests and prove that governments would never again have to rescue the financial system because one enormous institution collapsed. Meanwhile, almost unnoticed outside technology…
Three months ago, I wrote a short piece about Revolut but, since then, there has been an extraordinary amount of Revolut news: a banking licence in France; full banking status in Britain; conditional approval for a US national bank; a banking licence in Australia; banking operations in Mexico; expansion into Finland; licences in the UAE;…
There was a headline the other day that really annoyed me: Major Banks Are Racing to Appoint Chief AI Officers It annoyed me because it reveals something much deeper about how banks think. Whenever something becomes strategically important, banks respond by appointing a new executive to own it. AI is simply the latest example. For…
I came across another interesting piece of proposed American legislation this week: the GRANITE Act. On the surface, it has nothing specifically to do with banking, stablecoins or cryptocurrencies, but put it alongside the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act and something much bigger starts to emerge. America is building a digital financial fortress. The GENIUS…
