Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

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How Google makes money

Just recovering from a two week stint abroad – more on this later this week – and back to blogging as usual. However, as my brain has been completely switched off from banking and stuff (well, almost), I'm going to share a couple of interesting infographics I received whilst away. Today's is on Google and…

How Google Makes Its Money

Holiday Humour #9: Entrepreneurialism

A wealthy businessman gave a very emotional speech about his rise to glory. “When I first came to this town thirty years ago”, he said, “I had no car.  I just had the suit on my back.  The soles of my shoes were worn thin and I carried all of my possessions in a brown…

White-house

A £30 billion banking mess (but it’s getting sorted out)

I hosted a dinner this week, where a group of senior bank executives involved in cleaning up the PPI mess gathered to debate and discuss what had been learnt from the experience. For those overseas readers who are unfamiliar with the situation, the UK banking industry has been caught out with a massive consumer mis-selling…

PPI claims processed

A tale of two bankers

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,…

Music and money

What have music and money got to do with each other?  Visa knows.  Visa just sent me a new white paper on the similarities of the experiences of the music industry over the past decade or so and the lessons that the industry teaches banks. Here’s the brief overview: Visa Europe is in the data…

A generational thing: why we don’t understand money

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…

Playmoolah

Building human relationships through digital channels

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…

Did U.S. Cyberattacks On Iran Backfire On American Banks?

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…

20 years of change and the challenge is still the same

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…

Do traders lack diplomacy and tact?

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…