Fintech

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,…

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…

There’s a really interesting research paper recently published by Apple’s engineers looking at how well LLMs (Large Language Models), the heart of AI systems like ChatGPT, and asking about their ability to deliver mathematical reasoning. They conclude that they are not ready for prime time right now. To illustrate the issue, TechCrunch gave this example: Let’s say…

Living in Poland, I have got used to using their local system for payments called BLIK. The way BLIK works is that you access your bank account app, enter a code, get a code back and make a payment at a point-of-sale, ATM, online or anywhere that needs a payment approved. The reason I like…

A year ago, a government commissioned report in the UK asked for a National Payments Vision and Strategy, or NPVS for short. Looking into this a year later, there does not seem to be much action. The report was produced by Joe Garner, founder of a start-up in the dot.com boom, a director at the…

I remember companies like Gartner and Forrester predicting that there would be a trillion dollar market in online sales by 2020 back in the 1990s. Now we are in 2024, it’s a three trillion dollar market, and so I thought it might be interesting to look at the various statistics being bandied about by firms…

I just stumbled across a leap in the world. Cordless charging. Forget your cables, everything is now just charged through the air or by putting something onto a wireless charging point. It’s called induction charging and you’ve probably already used it. You put your phone down on a mouse-mat sort of base, and it starts…