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, …
Read More »Another example of why banking is not the same as music
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 …
Read More »The Challenging State of British Banking
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 …
Read More »Banks make a corporates’ first experience, the worst experience
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 …
Read More »Is a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) inevitable?
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 …
Read More »The implications of PSD2 and third party access to accounts (research)
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 …
Read More »Banks could change, but the regulator won’t allow it
I mentioned yesterday that a bank CEO asked me the three things I would do if I were him. My response was: create the dream, live the dream, deliver the dream. A bit cheesy, but you need to read the context if you want to know more about the background …
Read More »Why it’s so difficult to compete with incumbent banks
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 …
Read More »My favourite banking screw up stories
There are so many examples of banks messing up customer accounts around the world that it would be tough to know where to start … except that as I live in Britain, that’s pretty good place to begin. There media here love to regularly report banks messing up, and so …
Read More »Are banks getting a rough deal from regulators (just look at Third Party Account Access)
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, …
Read More »The challenges of client onboarding (or why bitcoin will be regulated)
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 …
Read More »I didn’t say that banks are “too big to be disrupted” but “too regulated to be disrupted”
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, …
Read More »As the Bitcoin Foundation fails, banks wake up
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 …
Read More »Can you have decentralised exchange without centralised control?
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 …
Read More »What does ‘too big to fail’ really mean? [Infographic]
I just received this fantastic infographic from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, discussing developments since 2008 and the financial crisis. The context is whether the Big 5 American Banks are still too big to fail (TBTF), and whether the US government has introduced effective controls under Dodd-Frank to avoid the …
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