Future

I just picked up several interesting reports. The first is McKinsey’s review of Banking 2024. The good news? “The past two years have been the best for banking since before the Great Recession. Globally, banks generated $7 trillion in revenue and $1.1 trillion in net income, with return on tangible equity (ROTE) reaching 11.7 percent. Banks…

A year ago, a government commissioned report in the UK asked for a National Payments Vision and Strategy, or NPVS for short. Looking into this a year later, there does not seem to be much action. The report was produced by Joe Garner, founder of a start-up in the dot.com boom, a director at the…

I remember companies like Gartner and Forrester predicting that there would be a trillion dollar market in online sales by 2020 back in the 1990s. Now we are in 2024, it’s a three trillion dollar market, and so I thought it might be interesting to look at the various statistics being bandied about by firms…

Thinking about the Big Tech firms, most of them are enabling commerce. Amazon and Apple are building specific structures to make buying and selling easy. But one company is enabling fraud, scams and criminal activities. Meta. Meta runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as many other ventures from augmented reality to their X-like idea…

I just stumbled across a leap in the world. Cordless charging. Forget your cables, everything is now just charged through the air or by putting something onto a wireless charging point. It’s called induction charging and you’ve probably already used it. You put your phone down on a mouse-mat sort of base, and it starts…

My family has just been through a hard time. Mother, mum, is old and losing her faculties. My brother is her full-time carer and recently organised the sale of her house. Funds were finally transferred into her bank account, and that’s where the trouble started. My brother isn’t young and, in the spirit of trying…

I noted the other day that 60% of UK bank branches have been shuttered since 2015. A lot of people aren’t happy about this and so we see new bank hubs opening where, for each day of the week, the hub represents a different bank. But why do we need branches? I posed this question…

I just got the latest Finch Capital report on The State of Fintech 2024. Many of us think that fintech valuations and investments have gone through the floor, and this reports make clear that it depends where you are. The UK is doing well, as is the Netherlands, whilst Ireland has seen a 90% drop…

Someone asked me the other day whether banking mergers in Europe would be a big trend or just wishful thinking. I guess this is because of the imminent acquisition of Commerzbank by Unicredit. Their real point was that the major European banks will need to merge to survive. After all, if American banks can spend…

For over half a century, post the second World War, Europe has been integrating. From a few nations in the 1950s, led by France and Germany, the Eurozone grew to 28 countries. Then, with Brexit, 27. Now, after Brexit, there are rumours the alliance could shrink further as many countries have issues with the ECB’s…