Opinion

I got into a conference this week (for a change) where the presenter of a roboadvising wealth manager got into a bit of a Q&A scuffle with an audience member.  Felix Niederer, founder and CEO of Zurich-based start-up True Wealth showed the stats for their customers. Most of them are over 30, and the real…

I’ve spent a lot of this week talking about marketplaces.  We have a growing number of financial marketplaces appearing.  Lending marketplaces, credit marketplaces, payments marketplaces and more.  A marketplace is the bazaar.  Market stall holders gather to meet with prospective clients, and the digital version of the marketplace is the focal point for many FinTech…

5,300 Wells Fargo employees have been caught faking customer account openings in order to hit their sales targets. That sounds pretty disgusting doesn’t it, but it’s nothing new.  In fact, we here in old America or, as some call it, Britain, have been living with this for half a decade. During the 2000s, leading up…

As mentioned last week, the CIO’s role is changing from running an empire of maintenance engineers to organising a distributed development organisation. The change in the role is one from a hierarchical control structure, where everything is proprietary and internal, to a flattened organisation that is open and broad. Much of the developments will come…

I was talking with a technology firm the other day.  They offer everything from cloud to core systems.  Their issue is that the competition wins every time.  Not IBM.  Not Accenture.  Not TCS.  Not FIS.  Not SAP.  Not any of the big names you could mention in such areas.  No, their competition is the CIO….

Building on yesterday’s discussion of the digital divide turning into a human divide*, I find it intriguing how we talk incessantly about financial inclusion and how technology will bank the unbanked.  It is our dream.  But is it just a dream? The reason for thinking this is that poverty and inclusion is yet another area,…

I love the predictions of scientists, but they’re often wrong.  The internet has a litany of stupid predictions from IBM’s President saying that there’s a worldwide market for about five computers to The Atlantic predicting that, by the year 2000, we would no longer be engaged in wars. The latest predictions are that, thanks to improvements…

Well I couldn’t let this one go by without commenting on it.  A regular theme in the blog is get rid of old technology if it’s running core systems.  The reason is that systems designed before Mark Zuckerberg was born are surely not fit for purpose in this day and age.  Well, the CIO of…

We spend much of our time berating the banks and beating them up, but it’s not always the case.  Every now and again, I like to write about the specific good that banks do.  For example, 5 of the top 10 Charitable Companies in the USA are banks: Wells Fargo (#3), Goldman Sachs (#4), JPMorgan…

I was piqued by Victor Matarranz’s [SEVP Head of Group Strategy and Chairman’s Office, Banco Santander] presentation at MoneyConf last week, mainly because he began by talking about Fintech 1.0 versus Fintech 2.0. Fintech 1.0 he defined as the emergence of peer-to-peer lenders and new payments companies between 2010 and 2014.  During this time everyone…