Fintech

I find so many similarities between what’s happening with COVID and what’s happening with cryptocurrencies. Why? It’s all to do with how they’re regulated. I don’t know about your country, but I’m in between two countries: the UK and Poland. After recently visiting the UK, where COVID rules are so confusing you have no idea…

That old expression that what goes up must come down applies to so many things. An umbrella goes up and down, dependent upon the weather. Company executives who are going up will come down, most times. And businesses that appear to be bullet-proof can stumble and fall. I’m thinking Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak. Today, we look…

For the last more than a decade, all I’ve ever heard bankers say is that bitcoin is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, purely useful for money launderers, paedophiles and terrorists. So, why are banks now offering bitcoin services? For me, this is one of the biggest questions, but the answer is obvious: because customers want…

I see more and more stories about banks messing up customer accounts, system outages, data mismanagement, issues with technology and more. This is the one thing a bank cannot mess up. Airlines may mess up a booking; Amazon may mess up a delivery; BT or AT&T may mess up a connection; but a bank messing…

A new series of Shark’s Den is about to launch. You know the one, where investors meet young people who pitch ideas and, if they like them, they invest a bit of money for 80% of the business? I love the way the sharks ask questions like: How much are you making? What’s the price?…

From July 12, I will be chairing FinTech Week London. It’s my first time leaving home since February 2020, and a major moment as it’s also the first physical conference on FinTech that I’ve seen so far (Money 2020 and more to come). FinTechWeek London takes place from July 12-16 both in London and streaming…

Just received Findexable’s annual report on FinTech hubs and developments, which finds San Francisco, London and New York as the key FinTech hubs of the world. Behind those cities, Montevideo (Uruguay), Hangzhou (China) and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) are making great gains. What’s going on? Here’s the outline in the intro to the second edition of…

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits that should be in there,…

Money 2020 has just dropped an interesting report talking about FinTech 2.0 (although I’m already on FinTech 5.0). In fact 2.0 is a pretty old idea, as outlined in this blog from June 2016, so I think the context of the report is a bit off but the content is pretty good. Here’s the Executive…

As someone who has set up a number of small businesses, there are three major tasks that I hate: Doing the accounts Tax returns Invoices As the business owner, all I want to do is my job, to have fun, to get on with creating more customers and more business. However, the issue with accounts,…