Numbers

It was exactly 50 years ago today that the world’s first ATM was unveiled at a Barclays branch in Enfield, London.  As a tribute to the golden anniversary, Barclays has transformed the modern-day Enfield cash machine into gold.  Today, more than half of UK adults use an ATM at least once a week. Barclays Bank…

I’ve written a lot about Ant and Alibaba, but not so much Tencent, even though QQ social networking in China was a hot, hot topic a few years ago.  It was the first social platform to launch its own currency and, with 300 million users, was quite interesting.  Things have moved at a pace and…

I saw a really interesting presentation in Kigali at the Dot Finance Africa FinTech Summit from Yasaman Hadjibashi, Chief Creation Officer with Barclays Africa (soon to be something else). She began with a discussion of the make-up of Africa: By 2050, it is expected that the population will double from 1.2 billion today to 2.4 billion…

Expanding on yesterday’s discussion of how MNOs are sweeping up business for the underbanked and unbanked, Igor Pesin of Life.SREDA posted a lovely update giving even more detail.  Here is how he saw things … Fintech in Rwanda: the place where Telcos are surpassing Banks in the financial sector Telcos dominate in the financial sector…

During the discussions at Dot Finance Africa, there was a very interesting dialogue about the mobile network operators (MNOs), with panels featuring Airtel and M-PESA.  It was interesting to hear them talking directly about how they focus upon the customer experience and their singular objective of convenience.  Both MNOs talked about customer convenience.  The convenience…

I recently had exposure to two industry reports that are worth bringing to your attention.  The first is the Innovate Finance research into Industry Sandboxes. Commissioned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK regulator, the aim was to identify how Industry Sandboxes, rather than Regulatory Sandboxes, can help to create new services in finance….

Larry Summers, former director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, writes a regular column in The Financial Times.  His latest piece is his take on FinTech, which has the main headline that FinTech is taking away frictions in finance.  Yep.  The frictions are illustrated by things like interchange fees, the length of time…

There are different views of what constitutes a FinTech Unicorn.  For example, Techcrunch lists just 20 (+1) FinTech Unicorns today: ANT Financial                         $60B (Feb 2017) Lufax                                    …

When you have your basic needs covered – food and shelter – what do you need then?  According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s our psychological needs – love, belonging, self-esteem. This is exactly where digital plays into our hearts.  Our love and belonging is in Facebook and Baidu, which is why these are so…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hearing about a War on Cash.  The war, as illustrated by India’s recent demonetization, is not on cash itself but on the illegal use of cash and, by association, the fraudulent creation of cash.  Both fraudulent notes and coins along with large cash denominated amounts transferring…