Opinion

For many years we have had discussions about bank branches and a branchless future. I personally don’t believe in a branchless future, but many do. And yes, there are many branches disappearing, much to the annoyance of those who lose that physical store. For example, America still has a large number of branches (32 per…

The world feels fairly surreal sometimes. I watch the relentless rise in price of bitcoin, ether, litecoin and brethren, and feel it’s just a truly weird moment we’re living in. I’ve never seen assets rising 1000% of, in ether’s case, 5000% in a year. It’s crazy. Alongside this, I see exchanges being hacked on a…

I have bias. I admit it. I have a certain proclivity to be nice to people who hire me, so this is an upfront statement of subjectivity. I am not objective. Nevertheless, there are certain companies who warm my heart. They tend to be young, dynamic and often founded in my lifetime. They are run…

There’s a constant buzz about disruption, which kind of sounds like destruction to me. We have to realize that no one is going to destruct or even possibly disrupt banks. No one. It has not happened in my lifetime of working with technology in banks, and I don’t think it will happen in the next…

OK, so I said earlier this week that I normally get asked about security by someone who is threatened by the onwards march of digitalisation. Sure, security is important, and the issue is that for every step of innovation we create a step of risk. We don’t know the risks until they are exposed and…

Many people delight in digging up a quote from Bill Gates in the 1990s, when he was talking about banks as dinosaurs and famously stated: “we need banking, but we don’t need banks anymore”. Yay! We can stuff the horrible big, bad banks and replace them with lovely tech. Interestingly, twenty years after that famous…

At the end of most of my speeches, I get someone raising questions around security and regulations. What was interesting is that I got the regulatory one this week, but my host told me afterwards that one of the bankers in the audience had come up and said he was surprised that I hadn’t talked…

I was in a conversation with a regulator about bank competition, and they wondered how I saw banks changing. In particular, they were concerned about collegiate – read that as bank cartels – actions by the banks to protect their own interests. I thought about it and said that I did not believe that banks…

I was listening to someone talking about monolith versus microservices structures recently, and they likened it to an old car versus a new one. Old cars were made of metal and welded together into a solid machine where, if any part breaks, you have to replace the whole machine. The machine is unwieldy, slow and…

Why are most bank brands just acronyms? I know it’s a silly question, as banks are acronyms because who wants to say John Pierpont Morgan Chase when it’s easier just to say JPM, but it is endemic to banking that banks are acronyms. I was just writing down a few: HSBC, SCB, OCBC, DBS, ICICI,…