Digital Bank

Over the years, there have been many weird and wacky ideas for banking. There was the G&L Bank in the USA in 2000, targeting the LBGTQ+ community. It was a viable, niche, boutique bank, but twenty years ahead of its time. The was a David Bowie bank, surprisingly called Bowie Bank. Again, it did not…

For some time, Jill Castilla has been on my radar. Winning numerous awards for innovation in US banking, she shines out as someone special, so I made contact and asked if she would have a chat with me. She said yes!, so here is that conversation. Chris Skinner: The main reason I reached out is you…

Someone came up with the idea of running a series of events called Dinner with Skinner … no idea who would have thought that up … and so I run and moderate many discussions with fintech firms and bankers around the topics chosen by sponsors. The latest one was looking at a key question: how…

I was reading stories over the weekend of hundreds of branch closures planned by banks. This has been forecast for years – back in the 1990s, it was clear that branch based distribution was unsustainable and costly – but it has finally hit. When I was a lad, for example, there were over 20,000 bank…

I’m always looking for innovations in new banks and spent some time with MYbank, the bank created by Ant Group in 2014. My first visit was in 2017, and the bank was doing well. Focusing upon SMEs, the bank shot to massive growth volumes, making a staggering $30 billion in loans in first quarter 2022…

The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has sent Goldman Sachs a proposal to end their partnership within the next year, leaving Apple to find a new backer for its financial products. The Apple Card program was launched in 2019 to great fanfare but, within a year, Goldman Sachs was lamenting losses and costs for the partnership….

At another recent conference McKinsey presented. Now it is easy to take a pop at McKinsey but they have produced some useful reports recently, specifically: McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2023 Fintechs: A new paradigm of growth So, I was interested in their presentation. One slide in particular stood out, titled: the four key drivers…

Space … the final frontier … these are the voyages of the challenger bank Trekkie. Our mission: to boldly go where no bank has gone before. Today, we landed on planet Earth and decided to look at financial inclusion, and the role of banks in ensuring everyone has access to an account. In some countries,…

I just chaired a major retailers conference in Malmo, Sweden. Not a payments conference or retail payments conference or merchants payments conference. A retailers conference. It surprised me how much of the discussion was about loyalty, customer engagement and customer retention, as those discussions rarely come up at payments conferences. In fact, when I listed…

I was struck by one slide in a presentation the other day. The slide stated this: I need a mortgage … to buy a house Why did this strike me? Probably because you realise, from the customer view, that financial services has nothing to do with money. It is 100% to do with living a…