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The virtual banking brew in Asia

Varun Mittal, Associate Partner with EY, recently posted a couple of interesting slides about the launch of virtual banking licences to encourage challenger banks in Asia. If you’re not aware, there’s a great deal of digital banking activity across Asia. It’s not just in China, but there are notable things happening in Hong Kong, Malaysia,…

JPMorgan Chase: First Among Equals

When The Financial Times does what they’re good at – covering financial markets and not technology – then they do produce some fascinating content. Case in point is the latest coverage of JPMorgan Chase’s (JPMC) 2019 results. The bank’s latest results are stunning, with the fourth-quarter profit soaring to $8.52 billion or $2.57 a share….

China and India in 2020: Watch and Learn

I have often written about how the developing world is leap-frogging the developed world. The reason is that the developing world had no infrastructure in place whilst the developed world implemented their infrastructure in the last century. The developed world has become a legacy world. The developing world is a world fit for today. First…

Treating Customers Unfairly (#HSBC)

I’ve blogged many times that so called free banking is a fallacy.  It’s something I have blogged about for a decade, and the recurring theme is free banking should be banned by the regulator as it’s only free as long as you don’t go overdrawn. The result is that the most financially challenged group of…

The real reason people don’t change banks

Interesting conversation about switching accounts. I’ve had a few people saying that banks don’t have loyal customers, but they have trapped customers. By way of example, an email from a friend: I am just exactly as loyal to my bank as they are to me, which is to say not even slightly. I swear to…

Where Top US Banks Are Betting On Fintech

After yesterday’s article about how backward America is, in terms of payments, there’s a useful article talking about how they’re trying to rectify this. Bearing in mind that the big American banks are all spending $10 billion plus each on technology, they should be updating, and CB Insights latest installment looks at where the top American…

FinTech’s lies, damned lies and statistics

There are lies, darned lies and statistics. I often quote numbers in my presentations and get pretty annoyed if they’re wrong. I also prefer to take official sources rather than estimates. So I quote that last year China processed USD$40 trillion (277 trillion yuan) of mobile payments, as reported by the People’s Bank of China ……

Tencent’s WeBank runs accounts for just 50 cents a year

I recently attended a FinTech conference where Henry Ma, Vice President & Chief Information Officer of WeBank, presented an update of how the bank is faring in China. For those unaware, WeBank is the offshoot of WeChat Pay, WeChat and Tencent, and focuses upon financial inclusion in China. This may be surprising for some, as…

Three Commerzbanks are worth less than One Stripe

The big news yesterday is that Klarna is now Europe’s largest FinTech unicorn, valued at $5.5 billion, and the sixth largest FinTech unicorn worldwide (discounting Ant Financial, Ping An and co). According to CB Insights, Stripe is the largest FinTech unicorn (USA, $22.5 billion), followed by One97 Communications (PayTM India, $10 billion); Nubank (Brazil, $10…

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