Technology

I’m just starting a project on real-time, immediate, faster payments or whatever you call it.  It’s basically making a payment that is either settled within seconds or the data is moved and settlement takes place at a later time, but it look immediate. There’s lots of reports out there about immediate payments, with my favourite…

I’ve been talking a lot about open sourcing financial services this year and, more recently, tracking Open Banking.   The Open Banking Working Group was launched just over a year by HM Treasury to create an Open Banking Standard.  The standard is meant to guide how open banking data should be created, shared and used by its owners and those…

I’ve noticed a great deal of schadenfreude related to the R3 bump.  Lots of people saying that blockchain is past its sell-by date, R3 are bust and distributed ledgers are dead.  I think it’s related to the journalists who, having delighted in bigging up blockchain big time for the past two years are now relishing…

I’ve recently been wowed by series such as House of Cards (Netflix) and The Man in the High Castle (Amazon), and am really blown away by The Crown (Netflix) and The Grand Tour (Amazon).   I’m blown away not because these are good internet shows, which they are, but by the budgets being spent on them….

Bye bye banking job for life Many of the banking folk I meet have been with the bank as man and boy, woman and girl.  It’s a job for life.  Funnily enough, I’ve never known one of those jobs.  I guess it’s because I work in tech, and many of the tech firms I’ve worked…

I know I talk about banking and technology most of the time, but I also have other topics of interest.  Art, history, travel, fine wine … although I obviously look at them all from a banker’s point of view and wonder what it’s worth. All that said, one of the biggest areas of surprise in…

It’s the end of the first full day of Money 20/20 2016, and it’s been a mixed day starting with a surprisingly packed room for my discussion with Moven, Simple and ING about digital banking. The story of the fish seemed popular (see last week’s blog). Banks are like this fish. @Chris_Skinner #Money2020 pic.twitter.com/iHsR6PiQY7 —…

A final comment on leadership for digital transformation.  I was in a conversation with a bank yesterday when, half way through, the senior chap there said “look Chris, we’re a 300-year-old institution, things change but not that fast”. 300 years old. Wow. They were actually established in the 1600s. That was just after the Great…

It’s intriguing to find more and more banks creating digital heads.  I meet them regularly, I’m the digital head of retail banking; I’m the digital head of retail business banking; I’m the digital head of the investment bank; I’m the digital head of our transaction banking business; I’m the digital head of our commercial bank;…

My presentations change every day, but I got a great new slide to illustrate the burning platform that banks sit upon.  This is the one I was blogging about yesterday, and the one area I blog about incessantly (so much so that I bore myself). But there is a burning platform in all banks, and it’s…