Opinion

Mar 27, 2009

Fear, war and anarchy on the streets of London

I fly back to London last night and see this headline in the Evening Standard: The full story is all about how anyone in a spivvy City suit will be lynched next week as the G20 arrives in London. Add to this Professor Chris Knight's comments on the radio yesterday: "We are going to be…

Mar 27, 2009

Fear, war and anarchy on the streets of London

Mar 27, 2009

Why are (UK) banks ignoring new media?

I spent a bit of time today thinking about trust in banking, a subject I’ve blogged about lots before. One thing we know is that times have changed. How have they changed? Well, have a look at this advert from 1991 for NatWest: She’s a mortgage adviser for NatWest in 1991: “it’s my job to…

Mar 26, 2009

Social lending: from baby to child

Zopa announced results this week that showed lending had risen 140 percent year on year. In short, Zopa offers a lean and mean, razor thin margin system for loans. As an lender, I enter Zopa and place an amount – let’s say $10,000 – in the system. Zopa then spreads that loan across a range of borrowers…

Mar 25, 2009

Collaborative competition

This is the sixth post in a series about why banking will be free (you can find Parts One, Two,Three, Four and Five if you want to). In this area let's get into collaborative technologies and, more specifically, collaborative competition. It seems like an oxymoron to talk about collaborative competition and yet for years we…

Mar 24, 2009

SEPA and the PSD: broken but not dead

I haven't written much about SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area, lately because there's not been much to update although the last time I did, I asked the question: "Are SEPA and the PSD completely broken?" However, there is now some news as I was with Gerard Hartsink in Hong Kong and Ruth Wandhofer in…

Mar 24, 2009

SEPA and the PSD: broken but not dead

Mar 18, 2009

Jibun Bank: a mobile telephone only bank

I’ve talked about UMPay, a JV between Unionpay and China Mobile, as well as eBank, an internet bank leader in Japan now owned by an etailer, Rakuten Group. This leads nicely into what is probably the most innovative bank I've seen so far: Jibun Bank, a Japanese bank which translates into ‘my bank’ in English….