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Some years ago, I remember a Chinese lender, Jiedaibao by JDCapital, asking applicants to send them a nude photo to get the loan. The photo would be kept private unless the loan defaulted. If payments were missed, the photo would be shared online to all your friends and contacts. That’s a good way to ensure…

This is quite a complicated update, but it came to mind when I saw that JPMorgan analysts are predicting stablecoins could destabilise the traditional financial markets. This is because the Federal Reserve decided in April that money funds created for the sole purpose of accessing its overnight reverse repo facility, which is called ON RRP,…

When I was a lad – a good start for any commentary – we didn’t know nothing about money. I got pocket money from my dad but, if I begged hard enough and long enough, my dad would relent and buy me that Batman Corgi car I had been lusting after. At school, they taught…

I saw an interesting comment the other day that got lots of shares, likes and clicks: fintech founders MUST have some experience in banking or financial services background first before they are funded. Many fintech neophytes destroy so much value not out of deliberate actions but just pure ignorance. Funnily enough the person making this…

Every day I am finding security on my banking transactions more and more annoying. The reason? I have to confirm via a secondary approval the transaction; I then have to confirm the secondary approval with the vendor with a further secondary approval with the financial provider; I then have to process a further approval through…

KPMG’s recent Global Analysis of FinTech Funding Report shows a mixed landscape for fintech funding in H1 of 2023. The Americas, Asia Pacific (ASPAC), and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) saw different rsults when it came to investments in venture capital and private equity funding. The key takeaways from the report for H1’23 included…

It used to be simple: you died, left a will, told everyone where the money was, they shared it. Now, is it more complex? You die, leave a will, tell everyone where the money is … but the password was changed or has expired or your account is inaccessible for various reasons, as in you…

I bumped into an interesting online debate the other day, that started with Brian Armstrong, the CEO and founder of Coinbase, who always has something worthwhile to say. His opening line on a recent Coinbase blog is a good example: Coinbase is working to update the financial system that was built over 100 years ago by enabling…

There have been quite a lot of annoying changes to twitter in recent months. Rebranded as X with a scruffy looking logo, the service is trying to monetize its users by making the services more and more difficult to use … unless you pay. From an owners view, that makes sense. The platform needs to…

A few years ago, a bank CIO said to me that he was not that bothered about blockchain technologies, as these involved many externalities; he was far more interested in AI, as this could make breakthroughs with internalities. In case his words are lost in translation, what he meant is that blockchain would not deliver return…