Following our regular weekly interview, the Finanser talks this week with one of Europe’s fastest growing unicorns, Klarna, in conversation with co-founder and Deputy CEO Niklas Adalberth, To begin with, perhaps you can tell me how you and your colleagues came up with the idea of Klarna. Sure. When we started this company, the entire…
One of the readers of the Finanser saw my write-up on asset and wealth management, and asked if I could talk about what’s happening in investment banking. Answer: yes, I can. It’s more difficult to see the Fintech stars and unicorns in the investment space however, as it’s more opaque having been disrupted by technology…
If asking what should we do about the Fintech disruption is the wrong question, what’s the right question? I would claim it is how can we change the bank to be a Fintech platform? A good illustration of this is HSBC and its past, present and future. Under John Bond, HSBC became a global financial behemoth, in the same…
I recently attended a conference in America, where the audience of mainly bankers could post questions to the speaker. During the digital bank discussion, here are the questions that came in and, purely because they are fairly common in everyday dialogue, I thought I would post and answer the questions here. Most are related to…
As the internet reinvents commerce on this planet, it’s interesting to see the two things that enter the innovation mix: simplicity combined with connectivity. When you think about the Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Amazon and more, you realise that they have all simplified some complex things from sharing to finding. Google’s home page has stayed…
I was flicking through the Economist this week and was surprised to see a big quarterly special all about Fintech. Wow, this stuff is hot, hot, hot. That’s what the magazine makes clear: From payments to wealth management, from peer-to-peer lending to crowdfunding, a new generation of startups is taking aim at the heart of…
This is a blog from the Hotwire PR website, written by Camilla Ives. It summarises my good friend John Chaplin's Payments Innovation Jury Report report well. The report has been produced annually for the past four years and John will be presenting this in person to the Financial Services Club in England (June) and Poland…
I just sat through a nice presentation from Cognizant President Prasad Chintamaneni at the CEB Summit in Boston … … and was pleased to see others referring to channels and front-end investments as sticking lipstick on a pig. Something I’ve been saying for a while, as you have to re-engineer the core to be fit…
Just to finish off my contention that banking is not being disrupted, just evolved or adapted if you prefer, it’s worth a thought about what would it take to cause a disruption. First, I don’t think of disruption in a dictionary sense but in the sense that Clayton Christensen meant it in the book The…
Building on the discussion of data being key to disruption, I often use the phrase ‘digital core’ in this context. Therefore, I was intrigued when someone asked for a definition of a ‘digital core’ and one of the replies was there isn’t a core anymore. I wondered what they meant and, in explanation, they referred to…
