Fintech

Or where is Jan Marsalek, part two … As the headlines rolled out last week, I heard a name: Jan Marsalek, the former COO of disgraced fintech star Wirecard. It turns out that he was also the central figure in a GRU, Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (Russian military intelligence unit), operation created to spy across the…

We just had the annual Oscar jamboree and congratulations to Anora for its five Oscars, and particular respect to Sean Baker who picked up four personally, something that’s never been achieved before. But Hollywood has an issue. No one knows where the money goes. I’ve just joined some friends to fix that. It came around…

I recently came into some funds and, being conscious of the financial services compensation scheme (FSCS) limiting bank insurances of deposit accounts to £85,000 (€100,000 EU; $250,000 USA) have had to open new accounts to move things around. In general, the remote account opening experience with newer neobanks is pretty good. On the other hand,…

I find times interesting, as so many fintechs had an amazing ride in the 2010s but, in the 2020s, it seems not. Fintech took a hammering in 2023 with investing down 48% compared to 2022, which was also a bad year … … and now we move into 2025 and reflect on 2024 where it…

I found a fun meme on Facebook about passwords. Passwords. What??? When I was a lad, we didn’t have passwords and usernames. What has the world become? Well, it’s become a world of people who are dumb and stupid and create passwords that are ridiculous and easily hackable. For example, the world’s most popular passwords are 123456,…

I saw a fascinating pair of columns on City AM last week. One was advocating London as the UK fintech unicorn centre of Europe: London named Europe’s ‘unicorn capital’ for fintechs … whilst the other claimed the new UK Labour government policies were scaring fintech founders out of the UK and into Europe, in this…

After our Valentine Day shenanigans, it is interesting to think about the other side of love. The dark side. The fake love. The reason I mention this is that I keep reading about romance fraud, and wondering how people can be suckered into such scams. For example, there was a recent headline about a French…

Almost every day these days is an AI headline, but this video really struck me. It is showing the selfies we would have taken in historical times: Can you imagine? The reason it struck me is that you have to wonder today what is real online and what is not. The more our networked system…

I see a lot of people writing that Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is dead. That saddens me a little, as I created the term twenty years ago – have I mentioned this before? – but I agree. It is now past its prime. It was replaced by open banking. Then there was embedded finance and today it is…

There’s been a bunch of headlines in the last week of online banking failures whilst, at the same time, another group of headlines of bank branch closures because customers should use digital banking. Barclays hit by major IT outage on tax deadline day – BBC News Moment customers surge around Barclays’ cash machines for ‘free…