Uncategorized

Bill Gates said in the early 1990s that “we need banking but we don’t need banks anymore”. He was wrong. I hosted a banking seminar in the late 1990s where David Llewellyn, a Professor of Money, stood up and stated that “there will be more change in the next five years in banking than we’ve…

I hear this a lot, and don’t like it. Many banks say it these days, and they say it to be cool. To be like a start-up. To be like a Silicon Valley angel investment firm. To be like a young, FinTech unicorn. However, there is a massive difference between Amazon, Alibaba and Bank of…

I got an interesting graphic from RBS/NatWest who surveyed their customers about what they’re saving for. The interesting result is the dichotomy between the regions, where it shows that Southern British are saving to buy a house whilst Northerners, Scots, Welsh and Irish are all taking holidays. Something about how unaffordable homes are in the…

The term The Internet of Things (IoT) was first used twenty years ago. Twenty years later, IoT is emerging rapidly. We have our cars and homes networked but, more than this, we have gadgets like Google Home, Siri and Alexa. Amazon has taken this even further with services like Key for Garage, a smart door…

There’s a regular itch that I feel in the back of my neck. I scratch it, but it won’t go away. The itch is an alarm call really, and it’s asking whether all this FinTech investment is worth it. Last year, $111.8 billion was invested in over 12,000 start-up FinTech firms worldwide, according to KPMG….

Another interesting nuance of the FinTech Bank is the integration of business and technology. I’ve referenced this a few times, but wanted to be explicit that these banks think technology is business and business is technology. This is clearly demonstrated in their microservices team structures and agile thinking. Auditors, compliance, financial and marketing people sit…

I’ve been blogging about digital transformation and one commentator asked me to qualify what I actually meant by a bank ‘transforming’ versus the others. This is something I intended to blog about but Bill Streeter over at The Financial Brand beat me to it in his reporting of research by BDO, the American assurance, tax, and…