After my recent blog about challenger banks, I received an interesting email from David Parker challenging the idea that a start-up is actually a challenger. Chris I continually argue that Revolut is not a challenger bank – it does not today have a banking licence. If you want to say any prepaid card is a challenger bank…
BACS released UK account switching statistics this week, and it makes for interesting reading. The big winners in the first quarter of 2018 are Halifax, Nationwide and HSBC. The big losers are Co-operative Bank, Lloyds and Barclays. Why? Well, Halifax offers a great incentive to switch: £75 … nothing like a bribe is there? Nationwide…
I regularly come back to the topic of bank branches, which are topical. A recent UK headline said that a town is now branchless … Closure of Lloyds leaves this Warwickshire town with no banks … whilst another says that the closing of branches is all about increasing profits for the banks … The cashless…
Ever since the collapse of Enron, we’ve seen auditors under question. I’m sure most of you can remember the Enron disaster but, just in case, the company went from Energy King to Futures Basketcase faster than Lewis Hamilton could catch up with Sebastian Vettel yesterday. Much blame was placed on their auditor, Arthur Anderson, who were…
I see a strong need for global regulatory co-ordination. In particular, in a globalised world with a global network where everyone can connect and transact in real-time, anytime, anywhere, the idea of national regulators regulating a system that does not recognise national borders seems counter-intuitive. This was illustrated well by bitcoin which has evaded most…
During #Money2020Europe Tink, the Swedish challenger bank, interviewed me on my opinions about all things finance and technology. It’s only five minutes and think it’s probably worth the viewing as people are picking up on various comments I made, such as: “The leadership team has to be completely committed to digital transformation as a structural…
There’s an argument raging that few have heard. The argument is whether it is the rebirth or death of banks. Many vote for the latter, but the former seems to be winning. Banks are reborn. Ten years since the financial crisis hit, many of the banks that received seismic shocks a decade ago are thriving…
If you didn’t catch the big news of yesterday, it was the first public firing of a robot. In this case, a bank’s chatbot, Amelia. Amelia was launched last year by Swedish bank Nordnet, with the aim of speeding up customer onboarding and improving customer satisfaction. Apparently, she achieved neither and so was sacked for…
I find it quite surprising to see statistics around ICOs, such as the fact that $13.7 billion has been raised by ICOs so far this year alone. $13.7 billion! In what? Well, the 10 biggest ICOs this year are: Telegram: $1.7 billion Dragon: $320 million Huobi: $300 million Bankera: $150.9 million Orbs: $118 million Envion:…
