Fintech

In an excellent article on LinkedIn, Priscilla Russo laments the state of Agentic AI from a payments point of view. Bearing in mind that 2025 is the year of Agentic AI – a world where AI agents do everything for you on your behalf – it is clear that we have a dichotomy between the open…

A quantum financial system, or QFS for short Maybe it’s the way my feeds are set up, but every day seems like a headline about cryptocurrency and AI these days. Take my daily things worth reading, and here’s a few examples just from last Monday. On crypto: Trump orders crypto working group to draft new…

As a long-term and dedicated user of facebook and twitter since the 2000s, it is weird to find that, today, they are no longer useful tools. The feeds are now stacked with Mark Zuckerberg updates, Musk propaganda and worse. The only tool that’s still useful is LinkedIn, although there are issues there too. So it…

It’s funny how things go around and come around again. For years, I’ve been bemused why banks cannot merge and be successful across borders. There have been almost zero European bank mergers of any size that are cross-border and the few that exist – Santander, Unicredit, Nordea to name a few – have all found…

On Monday, the crypto-president of America takes office. Bearing in mind that I’ve said several times he will be the crypto-President it is interesting that, in the last few weeks, he will be more than this. He will be the Big Tech President. Here is why. We live in such interesting times. Digitalisation has creeped…

For a long time, I’ve had this chart that shows how banks can become digital banks by moving from the distribution of paper through buildings with humans to the distribution of data through software and servers. It’s a stable of my presentations and the argument is that the front, middle and back office needs to move…

Some years ago, I wrote a paper for SUERF. What’s SUERF? SUERF stands for Société Universitaire Européenne de Recherches Financières, which is French for the European University of Financial Research. It is a non-profit, non-partisan organisation that aims to promote discussion and understanding of financial and monetary issues. All well and good. The reason for…

A final wrap-up of the big trends of 2025 is obvs to talk about fintech. Looking at the big fintech trends, probably the best place to start is with Simon Taylor’s 111 page report (ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN PAGES!!!). Simon and his BFF Jev at Sardine note a number of developments, such as the fintech hyperscaler….

So, I’ve already talked about payments, technology and mentioned cryptocurrencies but, this year, crypto deserves its’ very own singular entry. Cryptocurrencies are huge in 2025. This is not only because Donald Trump and Elon Musk will do their utmost to make America the Crypto Capital, but because – after sixteen years – cryptocurrencies are coming…

I got a whole load of payments predictions for 2025 … just a shame that it was no one paying me! Seriously though, a lot of people shared a McKinsey report that focuses upon this area, released around Sibos 2024, that opens with: “The tantalizing vision for global payments has long been that they’d be safe,…