Technology

It is the nature of finance that, at its core, is risk. Insurance is all about covering yourself for the risk of uncertainty. You don’t know if your house will be robbed but, just in case it is, you insure it. You don’t know if you’ll have a car accident but, just in case, you…

It’s intriguing to see how people react to my presentations. I am direct, some call me blunt, but my content is based upon deep research that mixes desk-based analysis, my blog, endless conversations around the world with bankers and technologists and a lot of experience. I’m not saying others are wrong, but I know I’m…

I’ve blogged on some of the themes I’m going to cover below, but the story gets clearer and clearer in my head the more I blog about and talk about it, so this version may be a little clearer than some that have gone before. The first is that banks organisational structures have to move…

I find it interesting as we move towards Open Banking and Open APIs through regulations at both the UK and EU levels. The push is for data sharing with trusted third parties with user consent. All well and good, you would think, but several surveys point to it not being quite so rosy. The typical…

I just spotted that Gartner have made a series of ten bold predictions for IT 2018 and beyond. They are summarised nicely by Forbes and are: By 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual- and voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%. Gartner has found that voice-based search queries are the…

I was talking about space exploration with a colleague the other day. They looked at me rather incredulously and wondered if I was a little bit barking mad. No, I’m quite serious, I explained, and put the case for the view that my children will be astronauts. Now I have touched on this before on…

I get lots of input from many sources, and one of the ones I like is the innovation survey of banking produced annually by EFMA with Accenture. It also usually proves to be one of the most read items on my blog – here’s the 2015 and 2016 reports – so, as I know you like it…

I’ve said continually that firms like Google and Amazon will never open a bank. I still believe that this will be the case – Facebook and Apple also fall into this view – and mainly hold this view because these companies would find full service banking a difficult and unprofitable space. In fact, I’ve blogged…

I was asked to explain what I meant by haven’t central bankers realised that democratised trust is in the technologies and code? when I blogged about the regulator’s views on bitcoin the other day. I wasn’t going to answer, but then have been prompted to do so after attending the Blockchain Live conference in London….

I was chairing a conference on blockchain and distributed ledgers the other day. The audience were a mixture of start-ups and banks, and the speakers were talking about how they viewed the world of distributed ledger developments. Many of the banks had successfully complete proofs of concept projects and were now moving to pilots. It…