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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…

Ten years ago on twitter, I kept getting messages from a guy called Preston Byrne about marmots. Marmots are basically the biggest squirrel in the world. Americans also call them woodchucks, although a woodchuck is a specific type of marmot, meaning all woodchucks are marmots, but not all marmots are woodchucks. They are most populous…

I love this chart. Source: Avinash Kumar on LinkedIn Not because it is perfect. It isn’t. No ecosystem chart ever is, and this one shows the companies as examples rather than an exhaustive list. I love it because it takes something I have been writing about for years and makes it visible. We keep talking…

For decades, the architecture of money was reasonably easy to understand. Banks held the money, central banks sat at the heart of national monetary systems, card networks connected merchants and consumers, and SWIFT connected banks across borders. It was complicated behind the scenes, but the basic structure had been remarkably stable for years. Then the…

You’ve been thinking about cryptocurrencies all wrong. Every few months someone declares that cryptocurrency is dead. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to recording every one of those predictions. The latest panic is bitcoin’s price falling below $65,000 and Coinbase reporting weaker revenues. A few months earlier everyone was predicting Bitcoin would hit $200,000. Before…

Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite the opposite. PayPal still moves almost $2 trillion every year, serves around 440 million active…