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A couple of things hit my radar late last week. The first was a prediction by Bain & Co that challenger banks would own a third of the UK banking market by 2030. This coincided with the news of Revolut finally getting their UK banking licence. It’s only taken five years. Let’s dive in. The…

The next era of payments: when money moves at internet speed I just found an interesting report by KPMG about a new payment standard called x402. Have you heard of it? If you haven’t, it’s built to ensure open, free, frictionless payments, and could be revolutionary for embedded, invisible finance. Built by Coinbase, the x402 protocol…

Innovation vs Illicit Finance: Why the Future of Crypto Compliance is Intelligent The US Treasury just produced an interesting document about digital assets, innovation and criminal activity. It’s well worht a read, so download the report here … but, if you can’t be bothered, here is my view. There is a familiar pattern whenever a new…

Thirty years ago, I wrote a strategy report for NCR, where I was working at the time, saying that the future of banking would be branchless and cashless, which was not great news for a company selling cash machines. Now, we live in a world that is nearing branchless and cashless. I’ve written quite a…

I just did a webinar sponsored by Xpand IT. Here is a summary: From Physical to Digital to Intelligent: The Third Revolution of Finance Let me start with a simple question. How many of you think we’re living through a period of unprecedented change in finance? We’re not living through change. We’re living through a…

I wonder what my kids will feel in a financial future of 2050 and beyond. We will probably regale them with stories about using cheques and cash and paper to exchange value. They will probably be amazed that such systems worked, but it’s a bit like me being amazed about how tally sticks worked a…

  There’s been a lot of talk this week about JPMorgan spending $20 billion on technology in 2026. It sounds huge, and it is, and it’s slightly more than their peer group spend but, bear in mind, this is a bank worth over $800 billion and with revenues of $185 billion, so you need to…

Two headlines really struck me this morning. The first is that Stripe is now valued at over $150 billion – I’ve been following Stripe’s valuations for over a decade (it was just over $9 billion in 2016) … … and the second is that they are thinking about buying PayPal, which would be immense imho….

Returning to the branch discussions, I picked up on Jim Marous’s recent podcast with Bank of America  (BoA) which is headlined: BofA is Building 150 New Financial Centres at $5 Million Each. Here’s Why The podcast focuses on the fact that BoA is opening new branches focused upon advisory services having almost halved its branch…

In the last day, I’ve been blown away by two developments coming out of China. One is an AI movie sequence that’s only 15 seconds long; the second was the Spring Festival celebration to welcome the New Year of the Fire Horse. If you haven’t seen them, you need to, because both show how technology…