Technology

The World Economic Forum has been conducting research over the last year around how AI (Artificial Intelligence) will change banking that was published last week. Here’s the lowdown: Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the physics of financial services. It is weakening the bonds that have held together the component parts of incumbent financial institutions, opening…

For all the negative views of technology, the positive is that it is enabling and inclusive. This is what Digital Human explores in depth. The main critique of my book is that it is too optimistic about the future of technology, and should be more balanced. Nevertheless, after yesterday’s post about the evils of the…

I was listening to Andrew Keen, digital sceptic, giving a keynote at a conference. He was lambasting the way in which the internet had developed, and the fact that it had gifted power to a small, select few companies, who own the world. Apple, with its trillion-dollar valuation, could buy four Chile’s or two Poland’s….

I haven’t written about blockchain for a while. I guess it’s because I got bored of it. I’m not bored of the promise of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Just bored of how much hype there has been and of so many companies claiming to have the latest blockchain breakthrough. However, when I saw this…

I keep thinking about the future internet and the ideal of creating a network where no one controls anything. It may sound silly, but it is developing already. In fact, in HBO’s excellent series Silicon Valley, the guys at Pied Piper recently did a pivot to try to create exactly this. The start-up gang are…

I regularly come back to the topic of bank branches, which are topical. A recent UK headline said that a town is now branchless … Closure of Lloyds leaves this Warwickshire town with no banks … whilst another says that the closing of branches is all about increasing profits for the banks … The cashless…

I present a lot around the world, and I am always delighted and honoured when a conference asks me back for a second visit. It reaffirms that you were ok the first time around and so a second bite is delightful. One such moment occurred last week at The Point, the conference for PaymentsNZ, the…

You may have seen that Ticketmaster just announced that thousands of customers worldwide may have been affected by a hack. If you didn’t here’s the low-down (via ABC News) The company said its British business, Ticketmaster UK, identified malicious software on a customer support product which was hosted by a third-party supplier Inbenta Technologies. Around…

I bet you were wondering why I hadn’t written an Ant update recently. Well, I thought it was getting too much … but then I just arrived in Hong Kong and the hotel has kindly given me a copy of Fortune magazine with the headline cover page talking about the battle between Alibaba and Tencent….

Last week, our good friend Dave Birch posted a great blog about the Amazonisation of Banking, most of which I agreed with. So I asked Dave if I could repost it here and he said “yes, of course”. Thanks Dave. Enjoy! The Amazonisation of Banking… …is very different from Amazon being a bank A while back, the…