Opinion

I have many bad habits. The main bad habit is collecting. I collect lots of things. Old comics, old books, old people. Well, maybe not the last one, but one of my really bad habits is collecting money. I have this thing that I call the money museum at home, and in the museum are…

I can remember 1984 well, as it was the year after David Bowie’s biggest tour for the Let’s Dance album, and also ten years since Bowie had produced an album dedicated to George Orwell’s classic book 1984. The album was Diamond Dogs, featuring time-tested tracks like the title track and Rebel, Rebel. The good old…

During the Asian Banker’s Retail Excellence conference that I attended recently, my friend Emmanuel Daniel posed the question: Who do you trust more: Facebook or the Government? Bearing in mind that this was in the week of the Cambridge Analytica leaked data storm, where everyone was screaming to #deletefacebook and Mr. Zuckerberg had to come…

I was having a chat about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in banking the other day. It was an interesting conversation, although most of the examples were for customer service via Chatbots, which doesn’t impress me much. I know that systems like Erica, short for Bank of AmErica, are up and running to make life easier, but…

There’s a lot of discussion about FinTech and what it means to banks. Originally, everyone was talking about disruption, disintermediation and dissing banks. Then the discussion went to incumbents versus start-ups. Then it ended up last year about partnering and co-creation. I personally believe most of the discussion is off-beam and off-track. For example, there…

I’m launching the new book Digital Human in New York on April 12 (if you want to come, register here), following on from our recent London launch. In London, I was delighted to host Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Bank UK, and Li Wang, Head of Alipay and Ant Financial for EMEA, as panellists to…

A good example of that big bank thinking I referred to yesterday is Santander, and an incident that I fumed about the other day. I usually make payments to EU companies via my business account, which pays no fees on EU payments as per PSD2 and SEPA principles. However, I paid a Polish company £86…

I was reading about banks being average to poor at marketing, and wondered about it. Banks’ advertising generally is about either being cool or in love with you. Here are a few examples from British banks. Lloyds: we’re old but still here with a big horse Nationwide: we have no pretensions because we are a…

I was quite taken by a headline in yesterday’s news where Marcus Schenck, Deutsche Bank’s Co-Head of Corporate and Investment Banking, forecast that deposit accounts might disappear in the not too distant future. He was on a panel at Bloomberg’s European Capital Markets Forum and was asked by an audience member how he was responding to technology…

I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following: Chris Skinner, a financial technology author, said it was “complete rubbish” to suggest the main use of cryptocurrencies was criminal….