Future

For all the negative views of technology, the positive is that it is enabling and inclusive. This is what Digital Human explores in depth. The main critique of my book is that it is too optimistic about the future of technology, and should be more balanced. Nevertheless, after yesterday’s post about the evils of the…

I was listening to Andrew Keen, digital sceptic, giving a keynote at a conference. He was lambasting the way in which the internet had developed, and the fact that it had gifted power to a small, select few companies, who own the world. Apple, with its trillion-dollar valuation, could buy four Chile’s or two Poland’s….

I spotted a chart the other day showing the millions of dollars lost on cryptocurrency platforms … Source: The Wall Street Journal Since 2011, there have been 56 cyberattacks directed at cryptocurrency exchanges, initial coin offerings and other digital-currency platforms around the world, according to Autonomous Research, bringing the total of hacking-related losses to $1.63…

The USA is a little bit confusing. On the one hand, they have some of the fittest people in the world; on the other, they have some of the fattest. On the one hand, they’ve championed the banning of cigarettes far more than any other nation and were the first to do it; on the…

I’m off to Chile next week and thought, in preparation, I’d look at the state of FinTech in Latin America. So far, I’ve spent fair time in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, and see these as the three major centres of activity along with Mexico. Equally, I meet a lot of the LatAm companies in Miami at…

BACS released UK account switching statistics this week, and it makes for interesting reading. The big winners in the first quarter of 2018 are Halifax, Nationwide and HSBC. The big losers are Co-operative Bank, Lloyds and Barclays. Why? Well, Halifax offers a great incentive to switch: £75 … nothing like a bribe is there? Nationwide…

I regularly come back to the topic of bank branches, which are topical. A recent UK headline said that a town is now branchless … Closure of Lloyds leaves this Warwickshire town with no banks … whilst another says that the closing of branches is all about increasing profits for the banks … The cashless…

Building on yesterday’s discussions of regulating, I got copied on a letter that’s doing the rounds from Sam Woods, Deputy Governor of the PRA (the Prudential Regulatory Authority). It lays out the official position and expectations of the regulator when financial insitutions are dealing with crypto-assets. It makes for interesting reading and you can read…

I see a strong need for global regulatory co-ordination. In particular, in a globalised world with a global network where everyone can connect and transact in real-time, anytime, anywhere, the idea of national regulators regulating a system that does not recognise national borders seems counter-intuitive. This was illustrated well by bitcoin which has evaded most…

I’ve been talking a lot about the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres these days. I’m adamant that these hemispheres are creating the future, whilst the North Western Hemisphere struggles with its legacy infrastructure. In particular, Europe and America are suffering from their old technology structures. Specifically, America is lagging the world. America. Land of the free…