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Nov 12, 2013

Why banks get stuck with legacy everything

I had a fascinating chat about bank issues with their legacy systems yesterday, and concluded that the legacy issues are the bank’s fault. There are two issues: one is related to banks believing that they are stuck with overheads that they want to eradicate, but customers won’t let them go; the other is banks being…

Nov 4, 2013

RBS: yet another British Jekyll and Hyde Bank

There was a whole load of stuff going on in the banking world last week about Q3 bank results and, in particular, whether the Royal Bank of Scotland should split into a good bank and bad bank. Like Northern Rock – or should that be Jekyll and Hyde? – the idea is to take the…

Oct 31, 2013

Why cash will survive …

So I’m moving house – have I mentioned that before? – and have house cleaning, clearing and removal services all hovering around doing work this week. Interestingly, all of them demanded cash. I offered cheques. Not interested. PayPal? No way. Bitcoin? Never ‘eard of it mate. What’s going on? Well of ocuerse, it’s the old…

Oct 29, 2013

Future of Money: the TV Series

A good friend of the Financial Services Club has launched a kickstarter project for her Future of Money TV Series. Heather Vescent is one of a small group of visionary people involve in finance, and I've just joined her as a backer of the project. However, with only 70 hours to go, will she…

Oct 25, 2013

The Jester and the Bishop in the Courtroom of the Bank

To this day, I have a long-lasting memory of facilitating a bank’s board meeting which ended up with the CMO and CRO having a punch-up. # It was not a pretty sight, but it was all down to the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) arguing that half of his new applications for loans and credit cards were…

Oct 24, 2013

Square Cash: looks good but there’s a catch

I finally got around to taking a good look at the Square cash announcement today. If you didn’t spot it, Square announced last week that you can send cash to anyone via email for free. All you need is to provide your debit card details and then you send an email to the payee with…

Oct 23, 2013

What problem does your innovation solve?

I’ve been involved in quite a few conversations recently about the challenge of migrating customers. Not migrant customers, but migrating customers towards new channels. The fact is that people don’t like change and no matter how much you push new fangled ideas, if the customer doesn’t like it then they don’t like it. Having said…

Oct 22, 2013

Does anyone understand their money these days?

We sometimes forget how clued up we are in banking and finance. In fact, I wonder how often we step out of the world of banking and see things through the eyes of the customer. Very rarely I imagine, if at all. How often does Stuart Gulliver walk into his HSBC branches and listen to…

Oct 21, 2013

Bank to the Future: the first crowdsourced investment bank

For some time now I’ve known Simon Dixon, the founder of Bank to the Future. Bank to the Future aims to be the first crowd sourced investment bank to make a serious dent in the way we look at banking. Here’s the pitch: After seeing this and thinking about what Simon was doing, I decided…