Technology

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…

I was listening to a group of CIOs talking about legacy systems change the other day. One said that it doesn’t matter how old the systems are; it’s all about whether they are maintainable and fit-for purpose. I kind of agreed with that, although I cannot think of any silo-based, product-focused, fifty-year-old, batch-based system that…

I met a Washington insider this week. During the banter, I mentioned how much better the European authorities are at beating up the US tech giants than the Americans. This is illustrated well by the recent New York Times feature on Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s competition commissioner. Ms. Vestager, 50 and a native of Denmark, is…

My second and last day at Money2020 Europe was packed with networking, meetings, panel discussions, private events and more. Throughout the day, the themes of the first day kept bubbling over. I guess it was typified with the comment that the CEO of TransferWise announced how happy they are to be partnering with banks. This,…

I’ve got caught in a few discussions recently with people who tell me Ant Financial are Chinese. They’re not. Neither is Alibaba and, if you think they’re just Chinese, you’re going to miss a huge change in the next decade. Ant Financial is an open marketplace of apps, APIs and analytics, that I’ve been describing…

I’ve used a statement for a while now about the competitive landscape of finance in the future. It goes something like: Banks have millions of customers, billions of capital and centuries of history, but are hampered by heritage; Start-ups have no customers, little capital and no history, but are driven by vision; whilst Tech giants…

For some years, I’ve been heavily involved in high frequency trading and quantitative trading, areas that are highly automated and pretty complex. I don’t blog about it much here, as it’s not appealing to the everyday person. It involves too much dialogue explaining acronyms used in investment markets and acronyms used in technology. In other…

I just listened to a presentation by Nick Thompson, editor-in-chief at Wired, about all things in the future of tech. A lot of it was focused upon Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning towards the end, but the first half was interesting as it focused upon why there is a backlash against Silicon Valley right now. He put…

Today marks the day, finally, when Digital Human is available globally through Amazon, Google and all other online outlets. It was slightly delayed for release in Europe and America whilst the publishers were switched, but today it is finally online for all to order and receive within a day or two. I’ve been surprised that, even…