Opinion

So yesterday I was at this big debate about the state of trust in banking. First what is trust? Trust is a belief in, faith and confidence in something. Often it’s used in religious terminology – in God we Trust – and it used to be that we trusted our politicians and banks but that…

So to the really interesting question: if the industry is a polluting, festering, rotten and foul mess, should we try to shut it down? The reason I ask this is that this is the question that came up as I was writing yesterday's blog, debating the similarities between the banking and oil industries. If BP and…

I bet Venessa didn’t realise what she had started when she had her rant the other day, but I’m enjoying the thought process started by Venessa’s reactions to SIBOS, my reactions back and the reactions of the community reading these entries in their commentary and thoughts. In fact the commentary is great, and I appreciate…

I said I would respond to Venessa’s rant in a bit more detail, as she deserves a response and not just a pat on the head to say: “there, there”, which is what she implies most banking folks have done so far. Before I get into that, it’s interesting to see the reaction to yesterday’s…

SIBOS sparked two big conversations this year. Two separate conversations both targeted at fundamentally changing financial thinking. The first was the Long Now, which was all about how to invest for the long-term health of our planet. I’ve talked about that enough for the moment. The other conversation has been bubbling on twitter, and is…

So yesterday was an outsourcing day. Or rather it was a virtualisation and cloud computing day. Or isn’t that the same thing? Funnily enough, it was at a conference focused upon government issues in technology and information security, with lots of discussions about identity, secure email, information storage and data security best practices. On the…

You may think this blog title sounds familiar . It should be as it combines two key themes from the 2000s: the Death of Distance and the Digital Divide. One argues that technology has connected us all globally and overcomes distance which changes business models; the other argues that there are those who get digital…

It intrigues me how often we have a conversation about innovation, and everyone starts talking about new technology. “Oh, have you seen our iPad app, it’s really hot.” “Sorry, but our Android apps beat that hands down, and Android is hot today.” “Yea, Android is hot today but forget all of those things. You need…

A fifth big question for the session I’m running at SIBOS, focused upon Long Finance, is whether there is any way to create a system that allows all of us to confidently invest for the long-term? In case you missed the other four were: When will we know there won't be another meltdown? Who will…