Opinion

After talking about presentations yesterday, I’ve spent a long time presenting with slides. The slides help to tell the stories. Moving from slides with lots of text and bullet points to slides with pictures was my thing. Then slide decks with embedded video became a thing. Now, presentations with GIFs, …

I’ve been presenting all my life. The first time someone said do a presentation, I was so nervous that the words came out with a stutter, the structure of my speech was a mess, there was no confidence and the audience seemed to be hissing and booing. Sometimes they still …

So we’ve got our hook and lines set up. Now for the sinker! This was an approach I developed through working in various companies in marketing, sales and consulting roles. I call this bit the real cake (remember it’s a layer cake?). The hook is the topping, the lines are …

I talked yesterday about how to do my layer cake for a hook, line and sinker marketing structure. It made me remember generating this approach so I dug out an old document that discussed how to generate a hook. The hook is meant to be thrown to get the fish …

As it’s August and everyone is on holiday, I’m going to deviate a little bit from my usual daily blogging and talk about two other things: How to do sales and marketing How to explain FinTech to your kids You may wonder how I can talk about how to do …

I’m reflecting on COVID rules. As a guy who lives in Europe, the rules are that I need to fill in passenger locator forms, get a pre-flight COVID test (fit to fly), and a landing form registered with a QR code. It’s challenging and clunky, but turns out to be …

I grew up as an Englishman. Then I became British. Now, I’m a European. But then we had Brexit and all the other stuff. Yet now I live in Poland. I believe in a world of the future that has no borders, no flags, no barriers. Am I deluded? During …

I was imagining if I walked into a big bank job today. You are hired as CEO of Mega-Global-Bank PLC. What’s going on? Well, number one, no-one has any idea where the economy is going. There’s a global pandemic. Everything is up in the air, and we have lots of …

Were you proud of June? Did you notice that June was the month to celebrate Pride. Do you know what Pride is? As June ends and July starts, I had to reflect when I read an article by Christer Holloman, founder of Divido. It’s about diversity. I often look at things …

The other day, UK police raided a property where they found £114 million ($150 million) of cryptocurrency. The raid was part of an AML investigation, but I was particularly struck by this comment from Deputy Assistant Commissioner (DAC) Graham McNulty “There is an inherent link between money and violence.” Of …

After talking about Tribe One, the Digital Gang, yesterday, who use words like: Autonomous, intelligent and connected Democratised, distributed and decentralised Platform, ecosystem and open Reliable, resilient and robust Vulnerable, questionable and fragile Environmental, sustainable and renewable I’m moving on to Tribe Two today: the Analogue Gang. These guys are …

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits …

Talking about HSBC often drags me into political controversy. For example, when I criticised the bank for not making a stand over the Hong Kong protests, I got a lot of pushback. Frankly, I don’t like to dip my feet into political waters unless forced to and, in the spirit of …

I’ve grown up angry. Angry with the system, angry with the world, angry with the way things work, angry with me. Not great, huh? I need some anger management. I meet people who are laid back, who are relaxed, who are chilled. That’s not me. I’m a troublemaker. A fire …

As we move from cash to cashless, turbo-charged by the pandemic, there is a fundamental challenge to ATM providers like NCR and Diebold Nixdorf. I had this view back in the 1990s. It’s just taken a quarter of a century to become a reality. In the UK Link, the largest …