Technology

I see so much discussion of AI and cloud in finance, and realised the other day that we have created a whole new risk structure on top of banking and finance. The systemic risk of failure if a cloud provider goes down or an AI system goes rogue. This is a question raised the other…

I’ve been sitting and thinking. Not a bad thing, but a dangerous thing. I’ve been sitting and thinking about AI, Artificial Intelligence. How will AI change banking and finance? Specifically, how could we use AI to change banking and finance? When I think about this, I think about how banking has changed since the last…

I’ve said for years that the mobile network revolution includes everyone. Anyone who can find a friend with a mobile telephone can talk, trade and transact. Many have mocked my message, but the message is consistent: technology has transformed our planet. This is evidenced by that there are almost four billion more mobile connections than people…

It’s coming. It’s been talked about for years. It’s finally here. Tokens. Physical and digital assets are being tokenized. In fact, maybe your DNA has been tokenized. Soon, everything will be tokenized. We talked about this years ago, but it’s notable that VISA, SWIFT, BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are now tokenizing. In a number…

A few years ago, a bank CIO said to me that he was not that bothered about blockchain technologies, as these involved many externalities; he was far more interested in AI, as this could make breakthroughs with internalities. In case his words are lost in translation, what he meant is that blockchain would not deliver return…

I’ve been writing about the war on cash for years. It’s a constant theme that comes up at conferences like SIBOS, and the first time I think I heard the phrase was a Visa presentation back in the 2000s. Back in 2012, I wrote about a Pew report that surveyed a range of experts about mobile…

I often use this headline: An AI Completed 360,000 Hours of Finance Work in Just Seconds in my presentations. The story is about JPMorgan who automated the checking of commercial contract wording. The AI machine they deployed was so effective at saving time that they could layoff 1,500 lawyers. Is that a good thing? Equally,…

Some predict that, in the near future, the world will be run by AI robots, even Liverpool football team! The thing about AI is that it is only as good as the input it is given. For example, ChatGPT couldn’t give answers to any questions you ask it, without those answers being previously written by…

I watched the recent series Capture on the BBC where real-time images can be distorted and changed. This moves from CCTV images to live television. It’s all about deep fake technology where a person can appear to be ‘live’, when it’s just a fiction. Capture is like an extended episode of Black Mirror. It’s also…

I regularly come back to a theme, which is how cloud computing and the smartphone have changed the world of banking. Why banking? Well, the world of entertainment, flights, shopping and more were changed by the internet in the 2000’s, before these technologies appeared. But when the smartphone and cloud landed, banking was disrupted. Why…