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  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…

I’ve avoided talking about the Epstein files on this blog. The main reason is that it’s appalling how wealth, power and connections can get away with anything they want. The worst part of it, for me, was a report that alleges that Donald Trump watched a 13-year-old girl give birth to a baby girl who…

When the Genius Act was signed off last year by President Trump, I said that it was positioned to keep the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. Now, a new debate arises after Jamie Dimon (Chair of JPMorgan) and Brian Armstrong (CEO, Coinbase) had a spat at Davos. Did you hear about it? Probably…

Hartmut Neven, Founder and Lead of Google Quantum AI, has recently written a critical perspective on securing the “Quantum Era”, alongside his colleague Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs for Google and Alphabet. What do these guys know that you don’t? Perhaps, most critically, the fact that the near-term revolution of computing – quantum –…

Many have argued for years that branches are dead. Many in the fintech world believe that people don’t need branches. Some think that the pandemic proved that customers can bank fine without them and that many now prefer digital. Wrong. A bit like cash, the pandemic forced a change of behaviour. Less cash was being…

I just watched The Life of Chuck based upon a story by Stephen King (strongly recommended). Throughout the film, it constantly references Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar. The Cosmic Calendar compresses the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe into a single calendar year, where January 1 is the Big Bang and December 31 is the present*. At…

I’ve been talking with many friends about genetic versus environmental development. Back in the day, this was a big discussion in my Sociology classes. How much of your personality is genetic versus environmentally developed? Is it nature or nurture? This is a question raised regularly by psychologists and researches and, as a father of twin…