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I’ve recently written quite a bit about the GENIUS Act, the GRANITE Act and the CLARITY Act in the United States. Well, yesterday was the crucial day as the CLARITY Act moved through the Senate or, rather, it didn’t. The USA has spent years arguing that cryptocurrency needs regulatory clarity and the Digital Asset Market…

Over the past two days, I have looked separately at two uncomfortable developments in banking. The first is that banks are moving more and more of their critical infrastructure onto a handful of global cloud platforms, while the second is that artificial intelligence is moving from helping humans make decisions towards making those decisions itself….

We spent the years after the financial crisis worrying about banks that were too big to fail. We forced them to hold more capital, more liquidity, write living wills, run stress tests and prove that governments would never again have to rescue the financial system because one enormous institution collapsed. Meanwhile, almost unnoticed outside technology…

Three months ago, I wrote a short piece about Revolut but, since then, there has been an extraordinary amount of Revolut news: a banking licence in France; full banking status in Britain; conditional approval for a US national bank; a banking licence in Australia; banking operations in Mexico; expansion into Finland; licences in the UAE;…

There was a headline the other day that really annoyed me: Major Banks Are Racing to Appoint Chief AI Officers It annoyed me because it reveals something much deeper about how banks think. Whenever something becomes strategically important, banks respond by appointing a new executive to own it. AI is simply the latest example. For…

I came across another interesting piece of proposed American legislation this week: the GRANITE Act. On the surface, it has nothing specifically to do with banking, stablecoins or cryptocurrencies, but put it alongside the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act and something much bigger starts to emerge. America is building a digital financial fortress. The GENIUS…

Yes. The mistake is believing that the business case for AI is simply replacing people. If a bank employs 100 people costing £10 million and replaces them with AI costing £12 million, then viewed through the traditional cost-reduction spreadsheet AI has failed. Yet that calculation ignores what happens if those AI systems perform ten times…

There is a rather awkward conversation beginning in boardrooms about artificial intelligence. For the last few years, the question has been what AI can do, how quickly companies can deploy it and how many people it might replace, but the question now landing on the CFO’s desk is much simpler: how much is this stuff…

Over the past year, I’ve been doing something slightly different. I’ve been writing fiction. Not just fiction, but Pulp Finction. The idea behind Pulp Finction is simple: Fun. Fact. Finance. Fiction. Keep track of the full series here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HG6DP7C4 and here: https://pulpfinction.com/ I’ve spent most of my life writing and talking about banking, money, technology…

For years, I have argued with executives at banks about digital transformation and technical debt, so I finally decided to write down why and the whole issue really boils down to leadership and laggardship. Here are my thoughts: Technical Debt: The Hidden Balance Sheet of Banking Banks understand debt. They understand principal, interest, refinancing, maturity…