For years, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has sold itself as the future of finance: transparent, decentralised, unstoppable. Now one of the most respected security figures in crypto is saying: get out whilst you still can. Manuel Aráoz, co-founder of OpenZeppelin, believes AI has fundamentally changed the security equation in decentralised finance but his latest warning is…
I’ve just launched another new book! After the successful launch of Intelligent Bank with Huawei a few weeks ago I had, in the meantime, developed another book: Diary of a Ponzi Scheme. The scheme is all about Clint who creates a “Token Fund”. Investing in digital currencies and real world asset tokens, he suckers friends, contacts and his network…
I am excited to share that I have been named a finalist for the Newsletter of the Year award by Thinkers360, thanks to my content! I would greatly appreciate the support of my content fans by taking a moment to vote for me. You can cast your vote here: https://www.thinkers360.com/tl/profiles/view/15475 By clicking it = a…
For years, the conversation around digital banks focused on whether they could survive. Today, the question is very different: what are they becoming? The latest results from Monzo, Revolut and Starling reveal something remarkable. These institutions are no longer niche challengers. They are profitable, growing rapidly, attracting millions of customers and, perhaps most importantly, becoming…
For years, fintech has sold a compelling story, particularly Wise. Their message? Banks are slow. Banks are expensive. Banks are burdened by legacy systems and bureaucracy. Technology can move money faster, cheaper and more transparently. Source: Wise But today, Wise faces a €500 million potential fine for breaching money laundering rules. What’s going on? Originally…
For the last twenty years, I have had many arguments with crypto advocates about Liberterian versus State governance. Now, the crypto guys are the government. During those years, people worried that politics would be captured by Wall Street, Big Oil or Big Tech, but the emerging power bloc is crypto money and artificial intelligence. These…
We are living through the third great revolution in modern business. The first revolution automated administration through mainframes and databases. The second digitised services through smartphones, apps, APIs and cloud. The third revolution is now intelligence: machines that can write, analyse, reason, create and increasingly act on our behalf. That is why so many people…
I was thinking more about this third revolution of financial technologies. The first was very much focused upon automation administration using mainframe computing; the second moved from pure cost reduction to the changing dynamics of how to leverage productivity and cost using the network effects of connectivity, and driven by cloud and mobile; the third…
I spent last week in China with Huawei. It was fantastic and, finally, it gave me the chance to announce and release my new book Intelligent Bank. Regular blog readers will know that I’ve been talking about this as the third fintech revolution but I could not officially tell everyone that it was released until today! Here is…
What is a Sputnik moment? A Sputnik moment is the moment the world suddenly wakes up and realises someone else may have leapt ahead technologically. The phrase comes from 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, into space. Technically, it was just a metal sphere orbiting the Earth. Politically and psychologically,…
