Opinion

There’s the classic old joke about the European dream being a place where the police are English, the chefs are Italian, the car mechanics are German, the lovers are French and the bankers are all Swiss. The nightmare is that it is a place where the police are German, the …

Inspired by three events this week, I focused on apps for my panel discussion today … and got shot down in flames for talking bollards. Harrumph. Here are the events, the logic, the proposal and why it got shot down. First, the events. Event number one: my first iPhone My …

Some years ago, I delivered a presentation as a keynote with the title: “All Bankers are Criminals”. I actually didn’t mean “all”. The chicken feed, battery farmed, commercial, transactional and retail bankers are pin-stripe suited, humble pie, nice guys. I was talking about the evil animals of Wall Street and …

After my post last week about my latest presentation with an audio file, my keynote in Bahrain this week was going to be a variation of the presentation.  Due to being unable to fly to Bahrain, I mentioned on Monday that most of the day had been spent editing a …

Building on the World of Me post last week, I’ve just found out how powerful the tools are that are at our disposal today. This week, I’m meant to be chairing a conference in Bahrain: MEFTEC.  MEFTEC is now in its sixth year, and I’ve attended every year as a …

I haven’t posted a presentation recently.  Been a bit lazy, so here’s a bonus. My latest presentation on the future of (retail) banking: Branches are dead, the future is social View more presentations from Chris Skinner. And an audio file to go with it: Download Chris Skinner, EBF2010 (45MB) This …

I was watching a program about Sandi Thom. Sandi was the girl who played music in her bedroom, put it on MySpace, got picked up by a record firm and became an overnight star with a massive hit: "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)" …

After the long analysis of Jamie Dimon’s 36-page shareholder letter, we now have an 8-page shareholder letter from Goldman Sachs. I cannot remember such letters being of such interest in the past, and wonder if the let’s tell-all letter writing from Bank CEOs is the new fashion for the teens …

In this guest blog entry Brett King, blogger at Banking4Tomorrow and author of the new book Bank 2.0, looks at what it means to live in an age where the internet is THE bank … In a quick straw poll recently conducted via Linked In we had a set of …

It’s a question I’ve asked before, but is becoming even more pertinent as I see new identity management programmes being rolled out that are fragmented, uncoordinated and, in some ways, nonsensical. The point was brought home to me as I listened to the stream of discussion about identity management that …

So yesterday I argued that PayPal and their brethren of social monies don’t matter. It was like unleashing the sceptical banker that I know resides deep within me, and it felt good. Then I got a dose of new reality vision (maybe due to so many comments on yesterday’s piece) …

Many of us get excited about new and different toys in the payments world. From Jack Dorsey’s twittering Square to PayPal’s billions of payments, we think the world is changing dramatically. SMS texting payments in Africa and credit exchanges on Facebook add weight to our arguments for change in the …

It seems that I’m having a long whinge and rant all week, but I’m trying not to. What I’m really trying to do is to get some answers to this crisis of confidence in the banks and, consequently, the banking system. This is nothing to do with the credit crisis, …

Over the past year, most of the banks I deal with have dropped the word ‘innovation’ from their mantra. It’s strange but true that the focus upon being innovative had been such a focal point during the 2000s and now it’s all over. To illustrate the point, the Top 10 …

Banks aren’t charities and yet the non-stop bleating about bonuses and interest rates would make you think they should be run as though they were not-for-profits. But banks aren't not-for-profit; they are proprietary firms with stock listings. They are there to make money, not to exist for the public good. …