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A short time ago, I hosted an interesting group for the Nordic Finance Innovation meetings.  The meeting gathered several of the leading-edge Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) companies that have launched in the last few years including Bud, Clearbank, Leveris, Saxo Bank and Solaris.  Building on each others narrative it soon became clear that anyone could launch a…

I was talking to a group of Treasury folks and the guy before me gave a pitch about the CFO of the future.  The pitch focused upon how the CFO would be managing risk, incorporating different technologies, managing M&A, dealing with globalisation and so on and so forth.  I couldn’t help but sit there and…

You may be aware that I am a Non-Executive Director of 11:FS. If not, have you not been awake for the past year, and the success the guys are having? Not only have they won some of the biggest digital bank transformation projects in Europe – beating the likes of McKinsey – but also running…

There are lots of reports of robots taking jobs from humans, and our fear for the future world of no work.  One paper from researchers at Oxford University predicts that 47% of American jobs are at “high risk” of computerisation over the next two decades.  Another research report issued in 2015 by McKinsey Global Institute found that…

The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Although there had been numerous claims that Eugene Goostman passed the Turing test, that simply is not true. Let us just say that he cheated the test in a lot of ways (further reading). …

There’s an old joke about the guy who’s lost driving in the countryside who stops to ask a pedestrian how to get to the city.  The pedestrian replies: “oh, if you want to get there, I wouldn’t start from here”, and this is exactly how banks feel today.  They want to get to the nirvana…

I was interviewed by UBS’s wealth management team a month ago, when the bitcoin bubble was in full bloom. The price had exploded, tripling in a month. Now that it has burst, the interview seems quite prescient so, here it is … UBS interview with Chris Skinner Cryptocurrencies – digital currencies based on encryption –…

I was reflecting on a question posed to me recently by a Turkish banker.  He asked me: “why is it that the Western banks are always talking about legacy?”  I knew exactly what he was getting at, as the banks I deal with in USA, UK, France, Germany and other European nations are always fretting…