Thinking more about componentised versus integrator banks leads to an interesting dialogue that started way back for me. Fifteen years ago, we were grappling with bank models and structures and talked a lot about whether banks could be integrated retailers, processors and manufacturers of financial services or should they be specialised. Then the book The…
I just spent the day in a payments conference focused upon operational excellence. We talked about Basel III, SEPA, the PSD, Mobile … the usual stuff, but there was a particularly intriguing presentation from Olivier Denecker of McKinsey in the morning session on what operational excellence in payments is all about. I took a whole…
Last night I was presenting to the MAG-net group. MAG-net is the networking group in the City for the Mines Advisory Group, MAG, a charity supported by the Financial Services Club and others that clears areas of mines so that schools, villages and life can continue as it should in post-war territories. They invited me…
I mentioned I was in Iceland last week, and was interested to find out what the banks were thinking. We only ever hear of Iceland’s woes and troubles, and so the ability to see first-hand what was happening to the banks was one that could not be ignored. According to Wikipedia, there are only a few…
I mentioned I was in Iceland last week, and was interested to find out what the banks were thinking. We only ever hear of Iceland’s woes and troubles, and so the ability to see first-hand what was happening to the banks was one that could not be ignored. According to Wikipedia, there are only a few…
I just made a comment this week about Facebook Credits being bigger than Amazon by 2020. This was on the back of my favourite stories about Zynga becoming the biggest PayPal merchant in under a year on the back of Facebook games, and how QQ and Second Life currencies have been examples of how virtual currencies can…
I just made a comment this week about Facebook Credits being bigger than Amazon by 2020. This was on the back of my favourite stories about Zynga becoming the biggest PayPal merchant in under a year on the back of Facebook games, and how QQ and Second Life currencies have been examples of how virtual currencies can…
In the 1990s, I spent a long time studying bank trends and the future strategies banks and other would take. The conclusion I came to is that there would be a general cross-industry bank trend, where non-banks would enter banking and, in order to get banking skills, would acquire banks. The end-game would be that…
I’ve written about the end of privacy before, but now the big news in the UK is that privacy is a joke. There is no such thing. For example, we had a court of law here that could implement superinjunctions to stop the media leaking information about people’s private lives. Major stars of media, sport…
