Opinion

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…

I was reflecting on an interview about the role and importance of Asian, and specifically Chinese, FinTech when something exploded in the middle of my head. Not literally, of course, although you might have said that, but more an idea that had occurred to me a few times but suddenly was crystal clear. Stereotypes. We…

As part of the blockchain conference, I chaired a session with some central bankers talking about their views on distributed ledger technologies. These central banks have run trials and are thinking about it, but none of them are particularly big on blockchain right now. As mentioned on Friday, they see it as a long-term development…

I was chairing a conference on blockchain and distributed ledgers the other day. The audience were a mixture of start-ups and banks, and the speakers were talking about how they viewed the world of distributed ledger developments. Many of the banks had successfully complete proofs of concept projects and were now moving to pilots. It…

A short time ago, I hosted an interesting group for the Nordic Finance Innovation meetings.  The meeting gathered several of the leading-edge Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) companies that have launched in the last few years including Bud, Clearbank, Leveris, Saxo Bank and Solaris.  Building on each others narrative it soon became clear that anyone could launch a…