I was just sent a press pre-release copy of The Pulse of Fintech, the quarterly global report on Fintech VC trends published jointly by KPMG International and CB Insights. The findings are quite interesting this quarter and show that, after a significant pullback in funding in Q4 2015, mega funding rounds have lifted quarterly investment…
I’m often asked whether banks should be afraid of the threat of Fintech. My answer is that most Fintech is enhancing what banks do, rather than threatening their core business. I sum this up as wrappers, replacers and reformers, and that the only Fintech firms we should really fear are those that replace core bank…
ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value. A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what? That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa. …
Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya. It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa. What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and mobile financial inclusion, is that Africa is actually leading the world in…
So there are some clear lessons we can learn as base foundation principles when reimagining banking for the 21st century: Everything is peer-to-peer networked It’s all in real-time globally Commerce is not just person-to-person but more machine-to-machine We are looking at the exchange of value between machines and individuals, not just money Transactions are the…
As we start to reimagine the bank, it is obvious that focus on the platform design and user experience is key, as demonstrated by YouTube. A second key factor is recognising that the world has changed thanks to the mobile network. We probably go yea, yea, yea when we talk about mobile, as we’ve all…
I need a little time to think about my reimagined financial structure, but some of the basics are already in play such as the idea of thinking about value exchange rather than monetary exchange. Value exchange is based upon the ability to reach the world with a thought. I do that every day via social…
After writing about whether we are creating faster horses when we think of applying open sourced technologies to banking, some more thoughts occurred to me: Are we applying Blockchain to clearing and settlement, rather than reimagining the whole trade cycle from liquidity structures to collateral management using open source platform structures? Are we using data…
I launched ValueWeb in Singapore yesterday and my friend Vladislav Solodkiy, Managing Partner at FinTech VC Fund Life.SREDA, hosted the evening. He was kind enough to share his speech with me, so I thought I’d copy it here and share with you. Enjoy! From BaaS and neobanks to FINTECH-BANK Fintech is currently undergoing a natural evolution stage….
I remember being involved in a business process re-engineering project for an insurance firm some years ago. We looked at how the underwriting process worked on complex insurance risks and discovered that in the middle of the process, the documentation would move to the overseas desk. It would sit there for a day or two,…
