Opinion

I’m reflecting on COVID rules. As a guy who lives in Europe, the rules are that I need to fill in passenger locator forms, get a pre-flight COVID test (fit to fly), and a landing form registered with a QR code. It’s challenging and clunky, but turns out to be actually quite easy and no…

I grew up as an Englishman. Then I became British. Now, I’m a European. But then we had Brexit and all the other stuff. Yet now I live in Poland. I believe in a world of the future that has no borders, no flags, no barriers. Am I deluded? During my lifetime, the world has…

I was imagining if I walked into a big bank job today. You are hired as CEO of Mega-Global-Bank PLC. What’s going on? Well, number one, no-one has any idea where the economy is going. There’s a global pandemic. Everything is up in the air, and we have lots of companies with huge amounts of…

Were you proud of June? Did you notice that June was the month to celebrate Pride. Do you know what Pride is? As June ends and July starts, I had to reflect when I read an article by Christer Holloman, founder of Divido. It’s about diversity. I often look at things from the point of diversity….

The other day, UK police raided a property where they found £114 million ($150 million) of cryptocurrency. The raid was part of an AML investigation, but I was particularly struck by this comment from Deputy Assistant Commissioner (DAC) Graham McNulty “There is an inherent link between money and violence.” Of course, that’s obvious. You only…

After talking about Tribe One, the Digital Gang, yesterday, who use words like: Autonomous, intelligent and connected Democratised, distributed and decentralised Platform, ecosystem and open Reliable, resilient and robust Vulnerable, questionable and fragile Environmental, sustainable and renewable I’m moving on to Tribe Two today: the Analogue Gang. These guys are all about face-to-face, over-the-table, eyeballing…

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits that should be in there,…

Talking about HSBC often drags me into political controversy. For example, when I criticised the bank for not making a stand over the Hong Kong protests, I got a lot of pushback. Frankly, I don’t like to dip my feet into political waters unless forced to and, in the spirit of that thinking, I was prompted…

I’ve grown up angry. Angry with the system, angry with the world, angry with the way things work, angry with me. Not great, huh? I need some anger management. I meet people who are laid back, who are relaxed, who are chilled. That’s not me. I’m a troublemaker. A fire starter. Thing is that I…

As we move from cash to cashless, turbo-charged by the pandemic, there is a fundamental challenge to ATM providers like NCR and Diebold Nixdorf. I had this view back in the 1990s. It’s just taken a quarter of a century to become a reality. In the UK Link, the largest cash machine network, said there…