Opinion

I was quite taken by South Park’s co-creator Matt Stone talking to Bloomberg, about a deal where he and his co-founder Trey Parker just got paid $900 million to make six more seasons and 14 movies. His specific comment: “As you can see from this deal, we have f**k you money now” … made me think….

I’ve been close to Peter Vander Auwera for many years, thanks to Innotribe. He retired a few years ago on bitcoin – I wonder how many times I will use that line? – and became an artist. Great guy. But he’s still tracking me and others in the Finverse and posted this yesterday. It’s so…

I was thinking about things that are not being dealt with by banks or fintechs. Surprisingly, there are many things that come to mind: real-time proof of identity to avoid freezing of accounts multiple verifications of a payment to ensure you send to the right person’s account better use of FaceID and similar biometrics to…

Building on the Finverse, I always remember the big trading scandals of the 2000s with Jérôme Kerviel of Société Générale and Kweku Adoboli of UBS. In fact, it probably applies to all rogue traders of notoriety, including the most infamous one, Nick Leeson of Barings Bank. What did they all have in common? Gaming. You…

After talking about presentations yesterday, I’ve spent a long time presenting with slides. The slides help to tell the stories. Moving from slides with lots of text and bullet points to slides with pictures was my thing. Then slide decks with embedded video became a thing. Now, presentations with GIFs, video, pictures, text and a…

I’ve been presenting all my life. The first time someone said do a presentation, I was so nervous that the words came out with a stutter, the structure of my speech was a mess, there was no confidence and the audience seemed to be hissing and booing. Sometimes they still do that, yet presenting has…

So we’ve got our hook and lines set up. Now for the sinker! This was an approach I developed through working in various companies in marketing, sales and consulting roles. I call this bit the real cake (remember it’s a layer cake?). The hook is the topping, the lines are the cream and jam, the…

I talked yesterday about how to do my layer cake for a hook, line and sinker marketing structure. It made me remember generating this approach so I dug out an old document that discussed how to generate a hook. The hook is meant to be thrown to get the fish interested. What hook can we…

As it’s August and everyone is on holiday, I’m going to deviate a little bit from my usual daily blogging and talk about two other things: How to do sales and marketing How to explain FinTech to your kids You may wonder how I can talk about how to do sales and marketing, but didn’t…

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…