Technology

Sep 19, 2014

Maybe it’s not so Simple, after all

For some time, I’ve banged on about banks must redesign for a digital core. It’s no longer a world that can live in a batch overnight update, when real-time everything is here. This has been shown again and again by outages, and all of the incumbent banks are struggling to move from old world to…

Sep 10, 2014

Apple dazzle or Apple schmazzle?

After years of indecision and procrastination, Apple finally announces what they are going to do in the payments space and the world goes wild. All the media I read seems far more consumed with Apple Pay discussions, than about the iWatch or iPhone 6 with the bigger, flatter screen. Even when PayPal announce far more…

Aug 29, 2014

Wallet wars haven’t really started yet …

We’re talking wallets. Digital wallets. They’ve been talked about for a long time. Google Wallet was perhaps the first big launch but, since then, there have been many. Two years ago, I showed this slide from O2 on the state of mobile wallets, and said let the wallet wars begin: Two years later, the war…

Aug 15, 2014

Society is so digital, we do more with devices than with each other

Talking of how fast things change, here are a few Friday facts to make you smile (or feel ill). The UK Office of Communications (Ofcom) run regular surveys on our digital lifestyles. This year the impact of smartphone and tablet computing hits the radar and shows how things have changed fast. For example, this year’s survey…

Aug 15, 2014

Society is so digital, we do more with devices than with each other

Aug 13, 2014

As Facebook almost died over mobile, banks woke up

The times we live in are confusing. Just as we think we have clarity of direction, the direction changes. Take Facebook. That mighty social network, that links over a billion people in a massively sharing global hive. Facebook almost died. Yep, it missed a beat and almost died. Facebook almost missed mobile and, if they…

Jul 28, 2014

Fintech is the place to be (and so is London)

I was reflecting on the number of new companies starting new ventures in financial services, and wanted to quantify the numbers somehow. This cropped up because almost everywhere I go, there’s a fintech start-up or start-up challenge. Barclays has The Accelerator, SWIFT has The Start-up Challenge, Finovate highlights the hot new guys, Sberbank and Santander…

Jul 15, 2014

Welcome to your relationship machine, how can I help?

I engaged in a lengthy debate yesterday about digital banking (for a change). The core of the discussion is whether humans are needed in a digital bank. Not humans to program the bank, as they’re obviously needed, but humans to service the customer. It was somewhat of a null debate, as you will definitely have…

Jul 10, 2014

How bank twitter #fails are killers

I've blogged before about twitter fails, specifically JPMorgan's disaster last November, and it illustrates how companies are finding it challenging to adapt to the new connected world. Another great example of such behaviour was sent to me by a friend this week. A little known chappie with the twitter handle UKDazza (me suspects he's called…

May 13, 2014

Amazon’s secret sauce: customer obsession

I was watching this great advert documentary about Amazon on the BBC this week. It’s a rocking organisation that most of us mere mortals watch with wonder. From packing and selling books in a garage over the internet, it’s become a global behemoth (although Alibaba is bigger in China). Amazon generated almost $75 billion in…