I’ve seen several friends suffering with mental health issues. Much of it is caused by stress with work but, equally, I’ve noticed that a lot of it has to do with stress with money. Someone loses their job and only have savings that cover them for the shortest time. I‘ve seen several surveys that say…
I’m not saying I’m always right. In fact, I love it when someone points out I’m wrong, and shows me why, because I learn something. So, I was particularly interested when in Sunday’s Guardian, I saw the headline Blockchain: hype or hope. It’s quite a good article, and talks about use cases in voting, provenance…
I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share the original data. It’s a little like when I tweet a…
Today, I appear to be pretty well-known and respected in the FinTech community. Often voted as an influencer, invited to give keynote speeches at megaconferences and the successful author of 15 books, as well as chairing and being an advisor to many companies, life is pretty good. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact,…
A last post about financial inclusion and banking. I pondered the thought of how people who get inclusion will gradually rise and upscale to full service banking. I see it almost as a ladder of steps from exclusion to banked as follows: Step One: Financially Excluded (Hawala) These are people who have no access to…
As mentioned yesterday, I always get a new take on life when I come to Africa, and this visit is no exception. I’m chairing conferences where a range of start-ups, telco’s and banks are talking about their experiences and views. Halfway through the dialogue, a lightning bolt cracked through my forehead. Not literally obviously, that…
I just hosted a conference in Africa and you cannot attend a conference in Africa without financial inclusion, mobile wallets and microfinance coming up. It’s always on the agenda and top of mind, because most Africans have been excluded from financial services to date. In particular, focusing upon Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)*, which includes Kenya, Nigeria,…
I was talking the other day to a colleague about the phenomenon in Asia, India, Africa and South America taking place with mobile payments and the lack of take-up in the USA. Why is this, I wondered? Then got my answer, although it isn’t a singular factor but a combination of factors. First, there are…
Lots of people talk a good talk about the internet of things and how my washing machine could now make purchases but my question is: what would my washing machine want to buy? More powder and some salt maybe? A replacement for the dish that just broke? An intelligent washing machine buying things on the…
