Fintech

Over the weekend, I received a couple of interesting emails about things happening in Asia. The first is a translation of an announcement from the People’s Daily, the most official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, discussing digital currencies. The article is fairly high level and makes no commitment to regulate, deregulate or commit to…

It’s interesting looking at banks’ strategic updates and how integral digital is to everything in the banks now. Now I don’t have time to read all of these updates and reviews, but two did catch my eye recently: Lloyds Banking Group in the UK and JPMorgan Chase in the USA. Lloyds’ CEO’s presentation was titled:…

I don’t often blog about investment banking as it bores my readers who are cool and trendy retail bankers and geeks, mainly, but keep coming back to this article about JPMorgan’s Best Execution AI engine, LOXM. LOXM’s job is to execute client orders with maximum speed at the best price, by using lessons it has…

I am struck every day by the disparity in financial structures I see worldwide. Recently, I’ve visited Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia for example, and am bemused how none of these countries has a strong mobile wallet operator. Instead, the nations seem to be 100% cash-focused, as my credit cards got hammered by their country’s…

I hosted a dinner focused upon Open Banking recently and what it means to FinTech firms and start-ups. There were no bankers at the table, but a lot of firms who consult, provide systems or are deploying new businesses in FinTech at the table. The general consensus around the table is that Open Banking is…

There’s a lot of discussion about FinTech and what it means to banks. Originally, everyone was talking about disruption, disintermediation and dissing banks. Then the discussion went to incumbents versus start-ups. Then it ended up last year about partnering and co-creation. I personally believe most of the discussion is off-beam and off-track. For example, there…

I’m launching the new book Digital Human in New York on April 12 (if you want to come, register here), following on from our recent London launch. In London, I was delighted to host Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Bank UK, and Li Wang, Head of Alipay and Ant Financial for EMEA, as panellists to…

I was reading about banks being average to poor at marketing, and wondered about it. Banks’ advertising generally is about either being cool or in love with you. Here are a few examples from British banks. Lloyds: we’re old but still here with a big horse Nationwide: we have no pretensions because we are a…

I was quite taken by a headline in yesterday’s news where Marcus Schenck, Deutsche Bank’s Co-Head of Corporate and Investment Banking, forecast that deposit accounts might disappear in the not too distant future. He was on a panel at Bloomberg’s European Capital Markets Forum and was asked by an audience member how he was responding to technology…

I’ve been flying around a bit and was lucky enough to find myself onstage the other day, chairing the Ant Financial Technology Forum at Money20/20 Singapore. I was honoured to accept to be the moderator of the afternoon and guess I was chosen because Alipay and Ant Financial are a 30,000 word in-depth case study…