Opinion

Today, I received a guest post from David Demar, cryptocurrency disciple, author and a writer for NoStop.net. I really liked what he sent through and thought it worth a share as it complements quite a bit of what I’ve covered in the last week.  Enjoy! Preparing for the Coming Crypto Revolution Much has been made of…

Continuing yesterday’s discussions about a big bank’s conference, I was intrigued at how often the subject of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin came up. But there again, it’s a topical thing at the moment with the price of bitcoins surging past the $4,000 mark and Goldman Sachs going against JP Morgan, and saying that they might even trade in…

I was at a large bank’s wealth management conference recently, where the CEO was being quizzed about various areas including a lot about technology and FinTech. He made several statements that I noted with interest: “Roboadvisory services improves our speed-to-market and human productivity, but does not replace humans. In particular, I can see that artificial…

I’ve blogged on some of the themes I’m going to cover below, but the story gets clearer and clearer in my head the more I blog about and talk about it, so this version may be a little clearer than some that have gone before. The first is that banks organisational structures have to move…

I just spotted that Gartner have made a series of ten bold predictions for IT 2018 and beyond. They are summarised nicely by Forbes and are: By 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual- and voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%. Gartner has found that voice-based search queries are the…

I was talking about space exploration with a colleague the other day. They looked at me rather incredulously and wondered if I was a little bit barking mad. No, I’m quite serious, I explained, and put the case for the view that my children will be astronauts. Now I have touched on this before on…

I’ve said continually that firms like Google and Amazon will never open a bank. I still believe that this will be the case – Facebook and Apple also fall into this view – and mainly hold this view because these companies would find full service banking a difficult and unprofitable space. In fact, I’ve blogged…

This is my wife. She doesn’t know she’s appearing on my blog today, but it doesn’t matter because she doesn’t exist. Well, she does physically but, according to my bank, she doesn’t exist. I only discovered this recently, due to trying to open a new joint investment account. To open the account, the bank asked…

I just hosted Jamie Woodruff, the Ethical Hacker, at our Nordic meetings in Oslo and Stockholm. He’s always got some good stories to tell, like how he uses your children’s toys to listen to your conversations or pretending to be a waiter at the hotel restaurant to catch all the gossip at a conference. In…