Some technology trends are highly predictable. One such trend is the modularization of banking, a theme picked up in a new Oliver Wyman report that’s free to coincide with Davos. You can download the report here, but it’s basically saying something we’ve known since the 1990s: banking is a set of component pieces that customers…
Another key development of 2015 has been the open sourcing of bank services. I’ve talked for a while now about Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) – first blog entry almost seven years ago – and this forecast that anyone in the near future would be able to build their own bank through apps, APIs and analytics. The core of…
Last month, I posted an update on the comparisons between Apple, Google and Samsung’s mobile wallets, so this month I thought it worth comparing their adverts. Let’s start with Apple Pay. The tagline is: If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone. I guess the marketing guys spent an age coming up with that…
I was recently interviewed by Emerging Markets Review just before travelling to Korea in July. The interview lasted a while, but stunned me when they produced the magazine with yours truly front page and centre. Rather than saying anything more, here's the interview which you can download as a PDF if you prefer. The global…
I can’t attend every conference everywhere, but I have just found an interesting one I missed recently in New York on July 28. This was American Banker’s Digital Currencies and the Blockchain Conference, previously known as just Digital Currencies. It’s gained quite a lot of coverage, with a great summary of the whole day over…
I’ve been stunned by the rise of P2P lending and crowdfunding, with Goldman Sachs (download their PDF white paper) predicting that it’s going to eat 7% of bank profits from the credit markets over the next five years and 14% over the next ten. Goldman Sachs states ‘We see the largest risk of disintermediation by…
One of the readers of the Finanser saw my write-up on asset and wealth management, and asked if I could talk about what’s happening in investment banking. Answer: yes, I can. It’s more difficult to see the Fintech stars and unicorns in the investment space however, as it’s more opaque having been disrupted by technology…
What happens when the cost of payments reaches zero, the speed of payments is instant, and everyone globally can make and take a payment, what happens then? I just had an interesting chat with someone and realised two things: one is that we’re talking about moving away from batch to real-time, and that’s where the…
