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…
I seem to be relentlessly blogging about fintech, cryptocurrencies and disruption these days. I guess because these are the things that are being discussed the most at the conferences I attend. So it’s easy to forget that there are key regulatory changes coming into play, and the consequences of these, probably because these things are…
I hosted a dinner last night under Chatham House Rule (no quoting anyone) in a superb venue (Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, established in 1798). The conversation was all about client onboarding and the challenge of keeping it fresh. You get the KYC info, and then the customer is onboard. But for how long? …
Quite often, with attribution, I let other websites cut and paste this blog onto their own. American Banker did that recently but changed the title of the blog from The reports of my bank's death are greatly exaggerated to Like Airlines and Pharma, Banking’s Too Big to Disrupt*. In so doing, the intent of the original…
I’ve blogged before about how bitcoin will become institutionalised, that you cannot have money without government, why it needs a Foundation and how a Wild West structure for value exchange will fail. It’s certainly moving in that direction after the latest revelations about the Bitcoin Foundation, alongside the equally revealing announcements that banks are incorporating…
I often have these debates with the bitcoin community about whether you can really have money without government. Let’s not call it money without government even, let’s just focus upon the question of whether you can have value exchanges that are unregulated. The main protagonists for bitcoin continually tell me this is the reality. They…
