The PSD2 is here. For those who don't know what that is, it's the European update to the Payment Services Directive (PSD) of December 2007. The original PSD aimed to harmonise the European payments markets and make the Eurozone behave as a Single Market. It achieved some of those objectives, but the update goes much further…
During the third phase of the innovation cycle discussed on Friday, the upstart has been noticed by the incumbents and becomes a target to be attacked. We saw this with Uber from the taxi firms; with Airbnb, it’s the unlicensed sub-letting of properties that hits the news; and with Facebook, the target was privacy breaches….
I attended a great meeting in Austria with Google yesterday. There were a number of Google Vision presentations and discussions, along with nice vignettes from Accenture and Raiffeisen Bank. One slide particularly caught my attention however, as I’ve just started to see a cycle in Fintech and this slide from Google’s Creative Evangelist (really?) Jeremy…
We started the new season of the Financial Services Club last night with meetings in both London and Edinburgh. The Financial Services Club runs from autumn to summer, and this is our 12th year of operation after starting our first meetings in London in 2004. Now in 8 countries and possibly more to come, the…
We had an interesting dinner this week talking about customer onboarding. The focus was on counterparty banks and corporate account opening processes, and the ongoing challenges therein. In a nutshell, due to the documentary and regulatory requirements for proof of identity and trust, the account opening process is the worst part of banking and can…
So last week I was honoured to present at a conference in Washington just before Senator Elizabeth Warren, the leading voice in America for changing the bank system. Senator Warren made a strong-worded speech condemning big bank mentality. A few choice comments included a condemnation of Jamie Dimon, who apparently was personally calling congressmen to…
I just found some interesting research about how banks in Europe are reacting to the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), and what other banks worldwide think about it. PSD2 is a work-in-progress European regulation that will impact financial institutions already operating within the scope of the first Payment Services Directive of 2009. PSD2 extends the…
I presented at a great conference last week on how ot start a bank. The conference featured some fine discussions of the challenges and opportunities of opening a new bank in Britain, and included a presentation from Victoria Raffé. Victoria was, until recently, the go to person fornprocessing bank licence applications with the Financial Conduct…
