Opinion

A good example of that big bank thinking I referred to yesterday is Santander, and an incident that I fumed about the other day. I usually make payments to EU companies via my business account, which pays no fees on EU payments as per PSD2 and SEPA principles. However, I paid a Polish company £86…

I was reading about banks being average to poor at marketing, and wondered about it. Banks’ advertising generally is about either being cool or in love with you. Here are a few examples from British banks. Lloyds: we’re old but still here with a big horse Nationwide: we have no pretensions because we are a…

I was quite taken by a headline in yesterday’s news where Marcus Schenck, Deutsche Bank’s Co-Head of Corporate and Investment Banking, forecast that deposit accounts might disappear in the not too distant future. He was on a panel at Bloomberg’s European Capital Markets Forum and was asked by an audience member how he was responding to technology…

I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following: Chris Skinner, a financial technology author, said it was “complete rubbish” to suggest the main use of cryptocurrencies was criminal….

I’ve seen several friends suffering with mental health issues. Much of it is caused by stress with work but, equally, I’ve noticed that a lot of it has to do with stress with money.  Someone loses their job and only have savings that cover them for the shortest time. I‘ve seen several surveys that say…

I was in a conversation the other day where someone asked me how I can tell if a bank is really trying to be a digital bank or just a bank. Off-the-cuff I immediately said that I have a litmus test to work out the answer to that question. I didn’t realise I was so…

I’m not saying I’m always right. In fact, I love it when someone points out I’m wrong, and shows me why, because I learn something. So, I was particularly interested when in Sunday’s Guardian, I saw the headline Blockchain: hype or hope. It’s quite a good article, and talks about use cases in voting, provenance…

I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share the original data. It’s a little like when I tweet a…

Today, I appear to be pretty well-known and respected in the FinTech community. Often voted as an influencer, invited to give keynote speeches at megaconferences and the successful author of 15 books, as well as chairing and being an advisor to many companies, life is pretty good. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact,…

A last post about financial inclusion and banking. I pondered the thought of how people who get inclusion will gradually rise and upscale to full service banking. I see it almost as a ladder of steps from exclusion to banked as follows: Step One: Financially Excluded (Hawala) These are people who have no access to…