Here are our key posts for the past week …
Machines that learn will decimate human jobs … or will they?
I was having a debate yesterday where a bank executive was asking me about what the hottest things in FinTech are right now. My answer was machine learning (AI) and blockchain. There are others such as contextual commerce, voice recognition and digital assistants, but machine …
House of Lords grills experts on a Britcoin
As mentioned last week, the House of Lords gathered a number of leading people to discuss blockchain and its potential to develop a digital currency for the UK. Brave New Coin summarises the whole affair nicely, and I want to keep this for the record, …
Blockchain is like the internet before the browser
WARNING WARNING WARNING This is a semi-technical blog update and it is rather long (20 minutes read). If you don’t like dealing with bits and bytes, you may want to turn away now. I’ve been meaning to also write a blog update on all things …
Sberbank is one of the first to Pikachu
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you may have noticed the rise of Pokémon Go. It’s been in the news everywhere, mainly because kids seem to be gathering in places they shouldn’t. Equally, the game has been responsible for everything from finding dead bodies to …
The FinTech Weekly Roundup by Anna Irrera (2)
Friend of the Financial Services Club and journalist with Financial News Anna Irrera has recently started producing a weekly roundup of FinTech news. She’s kindly agreed to let me republish this summary here on The Finanser, so here goes: Hello everyone, Fintech things you should know: UBS …
In other news …
Senior HSBC exec released on $1m bail in $3.5bn US forex trading probe - The Telegraph
Revealed: the biggest companies in the world in 2016 - The Telegraph
Hauling cash, replacing cards, fixing ATMs: the stubborn costs banks can't erase - Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Even after years of lean times, big U.S. banks are coming under new pressure to cut costs. But management teams are finding some expenses simply won't budge – like the $1 billion a year it costs Bank of America Corp to shuffle papers around and transport
World's 20 biggest banks rack up £252bn 'conduct costs' in five years - The Guardian
UK banks responsible for £66.5bn of total fines, customer compensation and legal bills, up from £54.6bn in previous period
This Bank of England chart shows how the rich got richer and the poor got poorer since 2010 - Business Insider
If you're among one of the upper three-fifths of UK society you're better off now than you were before 2010. But those in the bottom two-fifths are worse off despite nearly eight years of economic growth, according to this chart from the Bank of England's chief economist, Andy Haldane:
US bank buys new office block in London - BBC
Wells Fargo, one of the biggest banks in the US, agrees to buy an office block in the City of London.
How a whistleblower describes the mis-selling tactics of packaged bank accounts at Lloyds Bank - Daily Mail
A new whistleblower has emerged from the rank and file of state-owned bank Lloyds to confirm widespread mis-selling of packaged bank accounts going back to 2012. The bank mole says the tactics staff were encouraged to use were ‘shocking and monstrous’.
Why Italy's banking crisis will shake the eurozone to its core - The Telegraph
They call them le sofferenze – the suffering. The imagery is striking, the thousands of sofferenze across Italy, unwanted and ignored, a problem unsolved.
Royal Bank of Scotland Ross McEwan on Brexit: it's not a banking crisis – RBS has plenty of money - The Guardian
A little after 4.30am Ross McEwan picked up the phone to speak to his colleagues at Royal Bank of Scotland. The chief executive of the bailed-out bank had just learned that the UK had voted for Brexit. Up early to catch a flight to Edinburgh, McEwan wanted to ensure the contingency plans that had been drawn up several months earlier were being rolled out.
Governor Carney shuts down the Bank of England 300-year-old tradition of private accounts for staff - Daily Mail
Bank of England staff have traditionally held private bank accounts but Mark Carney has now ended the 300-year-old tradition. The Bank cannot keep up with modern and contactless technology
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Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...
