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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…

UBS versus Switzerland: when a bank becomes too big for its country There is a delicious irony developing in Switzerland. The country that spent generations building its reputation around the strength, discretion and stability of its banks now finds itself arguing with its largest bank over whether making that bank safer will make it weaker….

I was sitting this morning and thinking about how fantastic Agentic AI, autonomous commerce and programmable money is. It is the focus of my next Pulp Finction book Birth of a Unicorn being released in December. The thing is that there is a wonderful problem with artificial intelligence in banking: almost everyone agrees it is…

Ten years ago, I wrote a series of blogs called The Origins of Moneykind. They accompanied the launch of Digital Human and explored a simple question: where does money come from? Looking back a decade later, I’m surprised how little I would change. What I would change is the ending, because we’ve finally begun to…