Digital Bank

Fifteen years ago, I did a major survey into the use of cloud computing in financial services. Bear in mind this was really early days, and the results were quite nebulous. The main headline was that cloud computing needs better definition to succeed: The research report, which encompasses the views of over 230 financial professionals…

Last week, McKinsey released their latest podcast and the title caught my eye: Transforming to an AI-powered finance function It’s a really interesting chat between OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and McKinsey senior partner Lareina Yee on the podcast At the Edge. Listening to it (and there’s also a transcript), here are a few highlights of Sarah’s thoughts,…

Unsurprisingly, after a major election that will influence the Western world, the election of Donald Trump resulted in a flood of PR releases and contacts to tell me how this will influence the economy, Europe and the world. Some even got more specific, talking about how it will change fintech and cryptocurrencies. Let’s take a…

Building on my blog the other day about BLIK (the Polish digital wallet), I just got two really insightful pieces of analysis on European payments – talking of a payments vision – from PWC in a report on Europe’s open banking vision and Jeremy Light, a good friend formerly of Accenture, on EU wallets. Here’s the…

Two weeks ago, I asked where the UK Payments Vision is. It should have been delivered this year, and yet there is still no sign of it. Having said that, the Bank of England did start to build a view. In late July 2024, the Bank of England launched a Discussion Paper on Innovation in money…

I have been amazed by the transformative power of technology in finance over the past two decades. From mPESA in Kenya to Alipay in China to NuBank in Brazil to PayTM in India, we have seen a massive shift in the world of finance. The fact is that today, wherever you are, whoever you are,…

You may be wondering about the headline of this blog, but it’s all about the rapidly changing would of money. It used to be simple. Government would control monetary supply in the economy and wholesale and retail banks would distribute such money to businesses and citizens. It’s still the same, just that it’s all moving…

It intrigues me how quickly our world of money is changing from crypto to fintech to BaaS to infinity and beyond. The question that constantly sits in the back of my mind is how to regulate all this stuff to maintain trust? From Synapse to FTX to Beenz to Boo, how can the regulator keep…

I recently had a discussion about Genghis Khan, who I think of as some ancestral tyrant dictator who sowed his seed so far and wide that most of the modern world has his DNA. However, he also had another side called leadership. A friend of mine decided to use Khan’s leadership model to frame digital…

As mentioned, I’m dealing with my mother’s financial affairs as she reaches end of life, and I’m finding it incredibly frustrating. The process is that there first needs to be a Power of Attorney in place. Luckily, she saw that coming and gave it to me. That’s a government portal which allows me to take…