Fintech

When I talk about FinTech, I often reflect on the first time I encountered what I would, today, call a truly FinTech firm. It was on March 30, 2005, and a newly formed firm presented at the Financial Services Club an idea. The idea was to connect people with money to people who needed money…

I picked up an interesting article from Reuters, about how Asian technology firms are moving into banking in a different way to Europe or America. The article says that Amazon and Alphabet / Google are far more interested in serving banks with cloud and advertising, rather than competing with them, whereas Alibaba and Tencent have…

Someone said to me recently that most tech Unicorns are more like Leprechauns. A Leprechaun is also mythical and magical but, rather than delivering riches, it just promises riches at the end of a rainbow you never reach. In other words, most Unicorns are offering riches that are as mythical and magical as the beast…

During the weekend I presented the trends on FinTech and Tech Fin, my two favourite subjects. I’ll update on that shortly but I was also involved in a study the organisers – The European House Ambrosetti, a leading economics think tank based in Italy – conducted before the conference. The study looked at the bank…

I find it interesting when I read perspectives on FinTech, money and banking. Going digital, getting rid of branches, becoming cashless seem to be the main themes, and yet this ignores that every part of the world is different. It’s hard to go digital if the country has little infrastructure; it doesn’t make sense to…

I used to blog about blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) almost once a week … four years ago. Today, I hardly blog about it at all. I guess it just shows what’s top of mind and what’s not at any time in FinTech and, right now, blockchain is not top of mind. In fact,…

I was about to write a really nice piece about Apple’s announcement of the launch of a new credit card, in partnership with Goldman Sachs, when Brian Roemmele beat me to it. Who is Brian Roemmele you ask? And if you are asking that … WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Brian is a great speaker and prolific…

Not sure if anyone noticed that the Financial Stability Board – the world’s central banks tasked with maintaining financial stability – produced a white paper on FinTech last month. It was published on Valentines Day, so you were probably busy, and I only just stumbled across it. Here’s the Executive Summary. FinTech and market structure in…

So, I blogged last week about women in FinTech and whether we care, and got lots of replies … from women … who said yes, we care. Interesting that there were not so many replies from the other gender, but hey what do you expect? One interesting insight is that the future of work will…

A year ago I blogged about invisible banking and that I have some issues with it, namely that the bank brand disappears and the customer finds it too easy to spend without thinking. Now, I read more and more about embedded banking, contextual banking, frictionless banking and more, and I think people have got this…