Numbers

I’m just starting a project on real-time, immediate, faster payments or whatever you call it.  It’s basically making a payment that is either settled within seconds or the data is moved and settlement takes place at a later time, but it look immediate. There’s lots of reports out there about immediate payments, with my favourite…

I seem to find most of the truly exciting stories these days are happening in unexpected places.  Tanzania, Indonesia, Turkey, China, Brazil … and specifically India. I wrote a fair bit about the demonetisation program in India at the beginning of December, saying that it’s a laudable objective but a flawed one, as 95% of the…

Earlier this year, I summarised some of the best research papers that had been released on FinTech and Blockchain in three parts: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.  Thanks to Oliver Bussmann’s blog, I can now provide you with a list of the best research released on Fintech this year.  Enjoy! 2016-12 Digital Asset Holding Non Technical…

Reflecting on the last year, it’s been crazy.  I feel like I’ve spent most of the year jumping on and off airplanes.  Most visited cities are London, for obvious reasons, and Singapore.  I must have been there five or six times this year, and that reflects Singapore’s ambitions to be a Fintech hub.  I’ve also…

I wrote a while ago about the amazing digital identity scheme in India called Aadhaar.  It’s a card-based biometric scheme using a centralised database.  Of course, today, they would have developed the scheme on a mobile wallet with a distributed ledger but hey, you can’t win them all.  Some say that this just illustrates how…

I talk to a lot of wealth managers and private banks. They want to lead in digital as their clients are the coolest, richest people on the planet.  It used to be that everything for a high net worth (HNW) client was face-to-face; now it’s skype-to-skype; tomorrow it’s machine-to-machine. The large wealth managers, private banks…

I blogged the other day about too many banks and that there’s not a big enough market for forty of them here in Britain.  It made me think about what do customers really want?  We talk about digital, apps, mobile and more, and yet the average customer … are they bothered?  I suspect that many…

Bye bye banking job for life Many of the banking folk I meet have been with the bank as man and boy, woman and girl.  It’s a job for life.  Funnily enough, I’ve never known one of those jobs.  I guess it’s because I work in tech, and many of the tech firms I’ve worked…

I find it a little amusing to see the noise being made by banks about FinTech.  Lots of noise, not so much action.  And where there is action, it’s not necessarily real.  There are a few exceptions, but the majority seem to be tackling FinTech as more of a marketing requirement than an active cultural…

Building upon Friday’s discussion of how the system treats the poor, there are interesting movements afoot at the Brookings Institute.  If you’re not familiar with Brookings, it is one of America’s oldest Think Tanks and provides independent research into social sciences, particularly economics, governance and foreign policy, for the US Government. The Institute has a…