We had a fun session of the Financial Services Club this week, in light of the lack of clarity on Brexit from the UK Gov. The discussion was our regular New Year kick-off meeting with special guest David Doyle, sage of all EU regulations affecting Financial Services. David provided us with great insight into the…
In case you missed it, there was an important keynote speech by Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at a conference in France last Friday. It has some key announcements in there, so I’m reproducing the speech here for those interested in immediate payments and what Europe is doing. Keynote speech…
So one of my 2017 forecasts is coming true already: it is the year that blockchain moves out of proofs of concept and work and into the mainstream. Two great examples broke out this week from skunk works to media. The first I spotted was the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group using bitcoin for various…
I’m just starting a project on real-time, immediate, faster payments or whatever you call it. It’s basically making a payment that is either settled within seconds or the data is moved and settlement takes place at a later time, but it look immediate. There’s lots of reports out there about immediate payments, with my favourite…
I seem to find most of the truly exciting stories these days are happening in unexpected places. Tanzania, Indonesia, Turkey, China, Brazil … and specifically India. I wrote a fair bit about the demonetisation program in India at the beginning of December, saying that it’s a laudable objective but a flawed one, as 95% of the…
Reflecting on the last year, it’s been crazy. I feel like I’ve spent most of the year jumping on and off airplanes. Most visited cities are London, for obvious reasons, and Singapore. I must have been there five or six times this year, and that reflects Singapore’s ambitions to be a Fintech hub. I’ve also…
I wrote a while ago about the amazing digital identity scheme in India called Aadhaar. It’s a card-based biometric scheme using a centralised database. Of course, today, they would have developed the scheme on a mobile wallet with a distributed ledger but hey, you can’t win them all. Some say that this just illustrates how…
I’ve recently been wowed by series such as House of Cards (Netflix) and The Man in the High Castle (Amazon), and am really blown away by The Crown (Netflix) and The Grand Tour (Amazon). I’m blown away not because these are good internet shows, which they are, but by the budgets being spent on them….
I’m a big fan of Kraken, the digital currency exchange in California, as it’s my main exchange for investing in digital assets. If you want to know more, checkout their general overview at the end of this blog. I’m also a fan of their blog, which regularly sends me interesting stuff and they’ve just launched…
We had a meeting of the Financial Services Club in Oslo last night, talking about the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) and Open APIs (Application Program Interfaces). It was a fun meeting and covered the in’s and out’s of closed versus open APIs, the implications of allowing Trusted Third Parties (TTPs) access to the bank’s…
