I generally meet two types of bankers. The first is a technology sceptic. Their thinking goes something like: There are many fads and fashions in banking and technology. A few years ago, everyone talked about cloud. Then they’re all talking about mobile and apps. Now they’re yaddering on about Big Data and stuff. Of course,…
It’s interesting looking at the attitude of various generations towards money. The War Generation was raised to be in debt to no-one for nothing. Don’t take credit and, if you do have to borrow, pay it off as fast as possible. The Boomer Generation was raised to borrow as much as possible from everyone. The…
Chairing a conference all day, I was asked to give a summary at the end of the day, and was intrigued to find that all of my notes talked about human relationships through digital channels. Here’s a short summary to share with y’all. In the opening presentation, we heard that banks need to continue to…
This is a guest post by FSClub friend Tom Groenfeldt. Michael Joseph Gross raises some fascinating, and disturbing, questions in “Silent War,” in the July issue of Vanity Fair. Apparently drawing on extensive contacts in the rarified world of extremely talented hackers, and finding some corroboration from government and ex-government types, Gross recounts a consumer attack…
Twenty years ago, I was inspired by Mike Hammer and James Champy’s book Re-engineering the Corporation to start a consulting practise in business process re-engineering (BPR). I had just been made redundant from a firm that automated office processes with workflow technologies (yes, they had them back then, just after the Ice Age thawed), and thought…
Reinforcing the idea that traders in the City have no diplomacy or tact, here's two adverts from online trading firm AvaTrade. Their newest ad obviously forgot about something called 9/11 … … whilst their previous ad got banned for sexual inequality. Obviously, equality is not 3 + 1 (and is it just me or is…
I was in an interesting debate yesterday about the future of banking, as usual, and the future of branches, yet again. It was all interesting stuff. Then one of the presenters – a design agency that created and designed the Apple stores – talked about designing branches for people, not money. He illustrated this with…
I just got a heads-up about an interesting project taking place in Citibank called Darbie. Being aware of the challenge of new start-ups like Simple and Square, Citi are concerned that they might be disintermediated from the customer relationship, as are most old guard banks. But rather than ignoring this threat, Citi has taken it…
