Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

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The natural order of society is that the system dictates the system

Building on yesterday’s discussion of how Fintech firms will eventually become banks, I think a lot of people overlook the humanity in the network.  What I mean by this is that there is a natural biological function that takes place with innovation, and it reflects how humans relate to each other.  Humans need order to…

100 Brilliant Minds: What Great People Say

Funding Circle, the start-up company that has now lent over £1 billion to UK small businesses, sent me an interesting link yesterday.  Because I like the link and I like them, I thought I’d use it for today’s blog. The link is to a gallery of great people throughout history – 100 Brilliant Minds, they…

Banks need to become Lords of Data

I have a range of technologies I use, but get frustrated with them all. My Apple Watch is redundant, as is my Microsoft Surface, and I upgrade laptop and desktop every 18 months or so, largely to keep up with the demand for speed and reliability.  It could be that it’s because I’m not an…

Global structures for trusted advice are hard

I was reflecting on something this morning that is endemic to both banks and technology providers.  How do you provide great service to global clients? The issue is that most companies are split into three structures: product, process and customer.  Product is the back office manufacturer; process is the middle office focused upon operational excellence;…

An optimists view of bitcoin in 2016

I said yesterday that bitcoin would be superseded by a corporate-backed digital currency, but not all would agree.  Therefore in the spirit of fairness, a great article appeared on Coindesk last week by Tuur Demeester and I decided to finish this week’s predictions series on his views of what will happen with bitcoin this year….

10 Fintech predictions for 2016

There are a lot of Fintech forecasts out there but two of the best I spotted were by David Gyori and Pascal Bouvier, so I decided to take the areas I agree with most to provide a few headline Fintech predictions for 2016 of my own: #1 PayPal will be a primary acquisition target in…

Where will banks invest in technology in 2016?

Late last year SourceMedia released findings of a survey of US CIO’s that found the major focus for spending in IT in banks in 2016 would be on security systems. The only area of decreasing spend was on desktops. Interestingly most US bank CIOs will be spending more on branch technologies this year. In a…

The Top 10 challenges for investment banks in 2016

Accenture have produced a nice infographic and more, detailing the top 10 challenges for investment banks in 2016. Due to my limited wifi connectivity, I’ll just give you the headlines here but, if you have time, it’s well worth copying and pasting this link to learn more https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-top-ten-challenges-investment-banks-2016.aspx So here’s the top 10, and there’s…

2016 banking predictions

That’s not 2,016 banking predictions, which could be good, but banking predictions for the year 2016. Happy New Year. As is usual at the start of the year, I normally make a bunch of predictions about what will happen in retail, investment and transaction banking … but this year is not usual so I’m not…

The Top 10 Blog Posts of 2015

As it’s almost holiday time, I’m going to stop blogging for a while, so here’s the final blog post of 2015 and it’s the ten most read blog posts of 2015.  In at number 10: #10: After the glitch, RBS closes GTS (or how a global bank becomes a national one) I was surprised to…

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