Fintech

Banks are boring but necessary. Banks are stable, secure, reliant, resilient and shouldn’t innovate or do things that could increase risk to the system. As a result, banks have been here forever and, love or hate them, will never go away. According to a new report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), global banks could boost…

There are a number of numbers being bandied around regarding the major slump in the fintech sector over the past two years. The latest one that I picked up on is from the Indian data intelligence firm Tracxn, stating that UK fintechs raised just $4.3bn in 2023, a sharp drop from $11.2bn in 2022, which…

Over the week, I got an update about Revolut and their business model. It was quite interesting although a little bit macro-level. My favourite part is where the Business Model Analyst listed the competitors to Revolut: Monzo: Monzo is a UK-based digital bank that offers features similar to Revolut, including budgeting tools, international money transfers, and fee-free spending…

HSBC has just launched a rival to Revolut and Wise for consumer foreign exchange transfers. Calling it Zing*, and currently available only in the UK, the idea is to offer a “worry-free
international money app”, even though they exist already. Why would HSBC’s be any different? You can find out the nuts and bolts of Zing…

According to most pundits, 2024 looks like a great year for cryptocurrency. Analytics Insight predicts a resurgence, with the crypto market expected to surpass the US$3 trillion mark. Why? The main driver seems to be another bitcoin halving, but also Ethereum and altcoins seem to be big movers, alongside rising crypto adoption amongst mainstream institutions. Gemini,…

During December, I was bombarded with fintech predictions for 2024. Rather than doing my own, here’s a summary of some of the biggies. A Statista report projects global market growth from $127.65 billion in 2022 to a staggering $332.3 billion by 2027. Factors fuelling this surge include increased online payment adoption, the rise of embedded finance, and…

Over the past decade+ we have seen thousands of fintechs arise. Many are challenging and disrupting, whilst many more are providing and supplying. What is the role of a fintech? My advice is that fintechs are there to fix the things that banks do badly and offer service to those who banks don’t serve. The…

In case you missed it, Vladamir Putin did a media conference the other day and it did not include just the press, but the general public too. Questions like “when will the war end”, “why does my mobile phone say that I’m no longer in the Russian network when travelling to Crimea” and “tell us,…

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…

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…