Opinion

The future of banking is being fought over by artificial intelligence, human intelligence and, occasionally, a complete lack of either. Two headlines caught my eye yesterday, and they made me laugh. Not because they were particularly funny, but because they captured the glorious absurdity of where banking is heading. The first, from FinTech Global, asked…

I recently delivered a keynote at Visa Next in Poland exploring the future of money, payments and banking. From the technological revolutions that created today’s financial system to the arrival of AI-native banking, the industry faces a fundamental question: are we using technology to make banking better for customers, or just cheaper for banks? Here’s…

It is Halloween week and, by coincidence, the same week as the Chancellor’s Budget which is announced tomorrow. I say by coincidence as it seems likely that the Chancellor wants to drink the banker’s blood by restoring higher taxes upon them. There has been a huge debate over increasing taxes on British banks. The contest…

As Halloween approaches, I was reflecting on death and murder in banking. It is not a new thing for me, as it turns up quite often, but it hit me today with allegations that a former bank chairman arranged for his communications chief to be intimidated, in an operation that ended in his death. People…

I remember presenting to a major global bank twenty years ago about the dangers of social media and particularly Facebook. My thinking was that I could find one of their senior managers in a branch or call centre and discover, through their posts, everything about them. Their phone number, where they live, their partner’s details,…

Britain is replacing its heroes with wildlife and, judging by the reaction, you would think the Bank of England has announced that Winston Churchill is being retrospectively defeated by a hedgehog. Out go Jane Austen, JMW Turner and Alan Turing and in comes a barn owl, a bumblebee, a puffin and a hedgehog, although the…

I just watched Sakari Oramo conducting the Last Night of the Proms. It is a massive annual jamboree at the Royal Albert Hall in London and, among all the music, spectacle, flags and celebration, it was something he said that stayed with me. There was a special tribute to Dolly Parton, and Oramo used the…

On Tuesday, 11th September 2001, I was flying back from Nice, France, after a conference. We arrived home and switched on the television. What we saw was horrific. At 8:46 that morning in New York, 13:46 in the UK, the first aircraft crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later,…

UBS versus Switzerland: when a bank becomes too big for its country There is a delicious irony developing in Switzerland. The country that spent generations building its reputation around the strength, discretion and stability of its banks now finds itself arguing with its largest bank over whether making that bank safer will make it weaker….

For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems. Increasingly, I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about…