The Japanese earthquake and tsunami over the weekend was terrible. In a country that is familiar with Earthquakes – remember Kobe – it is surprising the devastation caused, and the Tsunami that followed made it far worse. In fact, a story that came out just today was of the poor guy Hiromitsu Shinkawa, who was found…
I got a note yesterday from a friend in Turkey who brought to my attention that the Board of Competition fined seven of their banks for working together in a cartel-style operation that was anti-competitive. They called it “a secret gentlemen’s agreement”. Apparently, the agreement in this case was based upon competitive bidding for corporate…
I’ve got a new theme building about money being worthless, useless, rubbish, a waste of space … you name it. Not real money of course, but money as a concept. It no longer works in the modern world. Money is meaningless. It was created for the physical exchange of trade, goods and services. Today we…
I blogged a while ago about the cute campaign for Compare the Market. The campaign kicked off two years ago and was fresh, different and new at the time. Now, it’s a bit tired, lacklustre and dull imho. It’s also been a while since I blogged about the comparasites of finance. These are the websites…
Yesterday I joined the excellent Digital Money Forum run by FSClub speaker and friend Dave Birch, and enjoyed discussions about social currencies, transit systems, contactless developments, the strange world of Japanese payments, the trends in biometrics and more. Throughout the meeting, various folks were tweeting. Specifically, Daniel Gusev of VTB24 in Russia. Halfway through yesterday’s…
I just met Josh Ryan-Collins, a thoughtful chap who works with the New Economics Foundation. Josh shared this chart with me from his works (doubleclick to enlarge): And if you check out the NEF website, it describes the fact that: "We need a financial system that channels resources into socially useful and productive activities that…
We've recently had a lot of dialogue about interoperability and the difficulties of getting all the pipes and plumbing of payments to work together. As one colleague recently said to me: "you have all this stuff coming in the front door, and all this other stuff going out the back door. It's not just SWIFT…
Originally by Woody Guthrie, this cover version by Wilco is darned good … and the lyrics are pretty interesting too. . The Jolly Banker My name is Tom Cranker and I'm a jolly banker, I'm a jolly banker, jolly banker am I.I safeguard the farmers and widows and orphans, Singin' I'm a jolly banker, jolly banker…
Funnily enough, I posted that last piece “Competition: do you know what it is?”, and then realised the ambiguity of that title. Competition: do you know what it is? Sure we know what competition is. Competition is when someone threatens to take your business away from you. Competition is set by being better, faster, cheaper…
