I had an interesting experience in Lebanon recently, where the accepted currency is the Lebanese pound or the US dollar. In fact, the US dollar is preferred as, since the civil war in the country, the Lebanese pound has been tied to the US dollar at 1500 Lebanese pounds per dollar. Everywhere around the country…
I really enjoyed a recent article on CGAP (the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor). If you don’t know them, CGAP is a global partnership of over 30 leading organizations that seek to advance financial inclusion. Housed at the World Bank, CGAP’s mission is to improve the lives of poor people by spurring innovations and…
I talked earlier about the homogenization of the world as we are all become globally connected, seeking global brands using a global language through global platforms. I truly believe that will happen, as it’s the natural outcome of the fourth age of humanity where we become digital humans, but there’s a long way to go….
One company that is seeking global domination is Ant Financial. The company has an open stated intention to reach two billion users by 2025. The way in which they’ll achieve that is through local partnerships, and many of those have been started already: Ant Financial invests in Thailand’s Ascend Money as part of global expansion…
I spend a lot of time talking with my friends in Turkey, particularly since the big change in climate after the protests last year. Nevertheless, from a financial markets point of view, it’s a fascinating place. One of the first to be contactless and, more recently, one of the first to offer social retail banking….
The British Bankers’ Association released their The Way We Bank annual report last Thursday. It was interesting. Here are the key highlights: Over the past five years customers’ activity on banking apps rocketed by 354%, with apps now an increasingly popular way to access current accounts rising from 21% of access in 2012 to 61%…
I’m boarding a flight yesterday and murfing (mobile surfing). Flicking between Facebook apps, twitter, bank account, BBC news and more. Suddenly I spot a new ICO – Initial Coin Offering – for a new bank. From Wikipedia: “An initial coin offering (ICO) is a means of crowdfunding the release of a new cryptocurrency. Generally, tokens for the new cryptocurrency are…
I recently hosted Nick Ogden, the founder of WorldPay and serial entrepreneur, at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings in Stockholm and Oslo. Nick is now launching the first new UK clearing bank for over 250 years called ClearBank. I’d heard a few rumblings about ClearBank, but hadn’t really go the message until I saw him…
I saw a really interesting presentation in Kigali at the Dot Finance Africa FinTech Summit from Yasaman Hadjibashi, Chief Creation Officer with Barclays Africa (soon to be something else). She began with a discussion of the make-up of Africa: By 2050, it is expected that the population will double from 1.2 billion today to 2.4 billion…
