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Shaping the future of finance

Fintech

Slave to the machine or free for a dignified life?

Looking at the world of the future, we all wonder what will happen to work. Will we still have jobs? Will all the dumb jobs disappear so we no longer have call centres (replaced by chatbots and avatars); accountants and auditors (replaced by AI algorithms); Uber drivers and hotel check-in staff (replaced by robots); and…

So, Facebook launched a currency …

I’ve blogged a few times about Facebook planning to launch a currency … Will Facebook become the world’s central bank? If Facebook launch a cryptocurrency, will US government shut it down? … and the fact that most regulators won’t like it. In fact, there are already questions being asked in US Gov about their plans,…

Monzo and Marcus: American challengers or just noise?

My mate Ron Shevlin is on good form these days. He’s written quite a few columns on Forbes that are clickbait: Customers don’t want digital banking The FinTech fast follower fallacy (which I spotted just after writing this yesterday) His latest created quite a twitter furore and was targeted at Monzo’s launch in the USA….

The logic of digital change

I just went through a conversation about my presentation for a forthcoming conference. They didn’t want to provide a prescriptive approach, and just asked what I talked about in general. That’s a challenge, as I once turned up at a conference and they said to me “you have seven hours”. I took eight. So, here…

Challenger banks don’t matter as they’re not a primary account

During Money 2020 Europe, I bumped into a chap from Monzo. No names mentioned, but he was buzzing and no wonder. The start-up has just boomed through two million users and is growing at over 60,000 account openings a week or 10,000 per day. Some think that number seems high, but they may have missed…

Alipay partners with six mobile wallets for Europeans

I recently started to worry that people might think I have some sort of arrangement with Ant Financial to publicly endorse them, as I’m such a fan-boy. I talk about what Alibaba, Ant Financial and Alipay is doing in every presentation, blog about them a lot and am thoroughly enraptured by their success. However, I…

SMEs are the FinTech’s bees knees

I write a lot about FinTech payments, lending, roboadvice and such like. But there’s been a strong bubbling trend underneath all this that has not gone unnoticed. I’ve just not blogged about it enough. SMALL BUSINESS FINANCE People talk a lot about finance for SMEs – small to medium enterprises – but there’s a lot…

When did FinTech become cool?

When did FinTech become FinTech? When did technology in finance become cool? I guess the first thing is to define FinTech, which I did badly four years ago. I say badly because my definition back then was: FinTech [is] a new market that integrates finance and technology. This new market is a hybrid of the…

Customers don’t want digital banking

So my snarky little friend Ron Shevlin wrote a piece on Forbes claiming that Americans don’t want a digital bank. As the guy who wrote the book Digital Bank you might think I would take offence to such a statement, but no. I agree with his content, just not his headline. His content states: 10…

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