I travel the world a lot and am amazed about the wave of changes technology has introduced into banking. In almost every country I visit, fintech has grown from an ember to a burner, and almost every country is being transformed. From Taiwan to Timbuktu, everything is changing. Therefore, just to give one more example…
I was quite amazed to see an item across my desk last week with the headline: Investors in cryptocurrency are more likely to be psychopaths Seriously? The headline is based on a report of a survey, published in the journal Plos One, who canvassed over 2,000 Americans of whom 30 per cent said they owned…
I remember ten years ago when fintech was emerging from under the hood and challenger banks become a new phrase. Most of the bankers I spoke to back then said they would never be really challenging. Ten years later, the situation is rather different. Revolut has over 40 million customers and is profitable; Monzo has…
I find it funny that we talk so much about onboarding, KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering), and yet the whole of that system is broken. Every day in every way, everyone is getting around the system. You may think that account opening is hard. You have to send identification documentation; you have…
Being debanked is pretty awful … just ask Nigel Farage or Chris Skinner … but what about if you’re a woman? As money controls life, do women get a good deal? Not really. Everywhere around the world, women have less access and use of banking, and yet women are the global influencers of finance. What’s…
I attended a meeting this week presenting a variety of startups and their ideas. All of them were great, but one stood out for me: Fairwill. Obviously playing on the word farewell, Fairwill provides an exit policy for humans … as in death specialists. It sounds morbid but there’s only two certainties in life: death…
It does amaze me how many people in banks and technology firms talk about Cloud, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Fintech, Blockchain, Apps, 5G, Analytics, APIs and more as though they are all buckets. They are buckets of technology, but in each bucket is a use case and, in many, hundreds or even thousands of use…
The UK has an election in July. The likely winner is the left-of-centre Labour Party, after 14 years of the righter wing Conservative Party. The new leader will be Sir Kier Starmer, a guy described as a “political robot”. Nevertheless, his party has created a burning platform to win votes. No, it’s not “stop the boats”…
