Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Opinion

Will children save planet earth?

After my recent blogs about Earth Day, Banking for Humanity, the FinTech Parent-Child relationship and Gen Y and Z: Doing good for society and the planet (an Earth Day FinTech update) Doing bad for society and the planet (an Earth Day banking update) Banking for Humanity? FinTech and the Parent-Child relationship Are you focused on…

If Facebook launch a cryptocurrency, will US government shut it down?

I’m writing more and more about Facebook launching its own cryptocurrency lately: Will Facebook become the world’s central bank? (March 2019) Will a global platform connect all of our money? (April 2019) This is because they are getting serious about payments and blockchain, after a variety of reports that they will launch their own stablecoin,…

Banking for Humanity?

I was asked to speak to the theme of Banking for Humanity at a conference the other day, and it made me realise that the five areas I’ve recently been blogging about came together nicely. First, there’s financial inclusion which is the theme of Digital Human. The fact that anyone who can get access to…

Does your bank look like this?

Henry Ford famously stated: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Of course they would, as they had no idea what anything else was. In fact, I use this story often as a Victorian vision of the future was a steam-powered robot horse. The reason they wanted this…

Bitcoin, Stablecoin, Blockchain, Enterprise Ledger … WTF?

I used to blog about blockchain and cryptocurrency almost every day. I stopped as it got too hyped, scammed and boring. In fact, my last blog was about the blockchain hype being dead, but the blockchain dream is still very much alive. Now, most people think that blockchain is something to do with bitcoin, but…

FinTech or TechFin (speech transcript)

I recently gave a speech where the title was FinTech or TechFin?  Everyone had been given a copy of my book Digital Human, and the speech was transcribed. Here it is:   FinTech or TechFin?  Thank you for inviting me to join you here. It is a great honour. I’m a technologist and spent all my…

Digital is a leadership challenge and not a project

I blogged in March (Transforming the bank – three phases of change) about the method to make systems change happen to transform the bank. In another conversation, I then realised that there are three phases of organisational change to transform the bank. The first phase is a recognition that the world is transforming in a…

200 currencies and 30,000 banks … are they really needed?

As I travel non-stop, I have one trusty little zip-bag in my travel case. It’s a zip-bag full of cables and converters, mainly to keep my phone fully charged all the time. Plug converters for America, Europe, UK and Australia, and cable converters between Apple and non-Apple products. As I was looking at my little…

Doing bad for society and the planet (an Earth Day banking update)

I’m not a particularly political person. Opinionated yes. A little bit right and little bit left, maybe. Not necessarily a centrist, true. And I try to avoid writing about politically motivated movements on this blog, except when they impact the banking industry. And today is one of those days. Continuing on the Earth Day theme…

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…