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Numbers

Challenger banks don’t matter as they’re not a primary account

During Money 2020 Europe, I bumped into a chap from Monzo. No names mentioned, but he was buzzing and no wonder. The start-up has just boomed through two million users and is growing at over 60,000 account openings a week or 10,000 per day. Some think that number seems high, but they may have missed…

Are you focused on the right customer?

Another few articles I’ve picked up this week have focused upon the new generation of consumer: Gen Z. I would call them the iGen but that’s too branded, so marketers call them Gen Z. Who are the Z Gen? As of 2019, the breakdown by age looks like this: Baby Boomers: Baby boomers were born…

Doing good … find out more (a final Earth Day update)

In closing this Earth Day week, I thought I’d rectify yesterday’s depressing news about banks funding the end of our planet to talk about the banks that are doing the opposite. In fact, there are many initiatives that are trying to create finance for good from community currencies to Long Finance. These are also themes…

Will a global platform connect all of our money?

When I talk about FinTech, I often reflect on the first time I encountered what I would, today, call a truly FinTech firm. It was on March 30, 2005, and a newly formed firm presented at the Financial Services Club an idea. The idea was to connect people with money to people who needed money…

Are these $1 billion start-ups Unicorns or Leprechauns?

Someone said to me recently that most tech Unicorns are more like Leprechauns. A Leprechaun is also mythical and magical but, rather than delivering riches, it just promises riches at the end of a rainbow you never reach. In other words, most Unicorns are offering riches that are as mythical and magical as the beast…

Time for a global FinTech platform?

I find it interesting when I read perspectives on FinTech, money and banking. Going digital, getting rid of branches, becoming cashless seem to be the main themes, and yet this ignores that every part of the world is different. It’s hard to go digital if the country has little infrastructure; it doesn’t make sense to…

Is the bank talking or walking digital?

I’ve been blogging about digital transformation and one commentator asked me to qualify what I actually meant by a bank ‘transforming’ versus the others. This is something I intended to blog about but Bill Streeter over at The Financial Brand beat me to it in his reporting of research by BDO, the American assurance, tax, and…

Why banks should stop closing branches

I wrote my blog about the bank branch being dead the other day, just as a new report called for banks to stop trying to be cashless and branchless because it harms society. This is from the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), an association founded by William Shipley in…

Oliver Wyman recommend banks don’t try to be digital? What rubbish!

There was quite a bit of coverage of an analyst report last week, putting forward the notion that big banks should forget converting the existing organisation, systems and structures, and start over. This one is from Oliver Wyman and, for me, it goes straight into the same bin as the Gartner forecast that most banks won’t…

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