Opinion

When did you last write a check (cheque)? When did you last receive one? Although a valid payment mechanism in some countries, it has been phased out in many. Finland stopped using checks in 1993 and Poland in 2006. The Netherlands have taken it a step further. Having banned domestic checks back in 2002, the…

I enjoy being around bankers who have been immersed in the industry nearly all of their lives and hearing their war stories. I heard two stories recently from a retiring banker, and thought it worth sharing to show just how far we’ve come. This friend started life in international banking in the wilds of the…

I just picked up a Financial Times article talking about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change the way you deal with money. It’s actually more about the Chinese internet giant Ping An, and how they’re changing finance using AI. If you are a customer of Chinese financial services group Ping An, you can use a new…

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…

It’s the holiday season, so my wife dragged me off to Disneyland with the children. It was a great experience but, halfway through, I saw this t-shirt: “It was all started by a mouse” Now it wasn’t. It was started by Walt and his brother who became a formidable team. Walt, the visionary, and his…

I sat through a soul-destroying meeting the other day. The meeting was with a C-level decision maker in a bank, and we were brainstorming. Ideas were flowing and, at the end of the ideation process, we went to see the C-level person to get his view. It wasn’t good. You can’t do that because the…

I was asked the other day about my worst prediction ever made. My answer may surprise some, but it was the view that intermediaries would disappear as technology takes over. I made that prediction about independent financial advisors back in the 1990s as call centres appeared. It didn’t come true. Since I made that prediction,…

As banks embrace digital transformation, there is a high level of discomfort amongst bank staff around the change. First, they hear almost every day that artificial intelligence and machine learning will automate their jobs. They fear the future. They fear losing their job. How can you reassure them that they can participate in the change…

No, I’m not talking about Francis Rossi but the issue of how to achieve sustainability. This came up during a lunch, where my lunch colleague had picked up on my discussions of sustainable finance, and started to debate how we could change things. The issue we agreed is with governments, but government focus upon votes,…

A big area of debate in banking that has been around since the 1990s is how to make banks more accountable for sustainability. I talk about this a lot these days as 71% of all Green House Gas (GHGs) emissions emitted on planet earth since 1988 came from just 100 companies. If we could change…