Opinion

I was thinking about cryptocurrencies and the fact that most of us have heard of bitcoin and Ethereum. You may have heard of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. Maybe you even know Cordana and Polygon. But do you know about UNI and Potcoin? Or Putincoin and Trumpcoin? What about Whoppercoin or Catcoin? It seems like madness…

I was intrigued by a post from a friend who had worked for a leading fund manager. Her boss was jailed for financial manipulation. In her words: “I witnessed the effect of regulators on an innovative mind. Prior to jail, he was a financial trailblazer in encouraging companies to dream big, much like today’s venture capitalists….

Life is swings and roundabouts … you win some, you lose some. Life is Sliding Doors moments … you look back and want to change things or wish you had taken that opportunity (Ed: it’s easy in hindsight). Life is what you make it … you cannot change the past or present, only the future….

I’ve noticed that my blogging has developed into regularly asking questions. Many of my blog entries end with a question mark. Why is that? It’s because I’m always asking questions. It’s because I cannot accept the way it is. It’s because I want to know more. It’s because I’m curious. Funnily enough I presented at…

It seems to be a week of guest columns, but that’s what happens when you find interesting things online and in your network. Today’s guest is Piotr Jan Pietrzak, Director of International Development at BLIK, the innovative Polish payment system. For followers of my blog, you may remember that I wrote about PEPSI two years…

Following on from last week’s discussion of smarter people not necessarily being wealthier, the mind is a funny thing. What makes you tick? What makes you laugh? What makes you cry? When you reflect, you introspect. It can be dangerous. Who are you? Why are you here? What is your purpose? What do you stand…

A natural thought is that if you’re smart, you’re more likely to be rich, but that’s not true. There are many smart people who are poor and many stupid people who are rich. Why so? Because wealth has nothing to do with intelligence. A study published in November 2016 in the Proceedings of the National Academy…

One of my good friends is Felix Hamilton, who is based in Hong Kong. This is the city that recently had a meltdown, due to government regulation removing many citizen’s rights. It is also a city that is meant to be a global financial and FinTech hub, but this does not seem so likely as…

Back in 2015, I interviewed Nikolas Adalberth, a co-founder of Swedish FinTech unicorn Klarna. Little did I know back then that they would be of the biggest stars of FinTech and the creators of BNPL, the Buy Now Pay Later, revolution Is it a revolution? Not really. It’s just another form of credit, but people like…

I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed a stablecoin using blockchain to enable global payments within Messenger, Instagram and…