Future

There was an interesting discussion at #Money2020 about Business Reincarnation. It’s a rather dramatic term, especially if you don’t believe in reincarnation, but it does help visualise the idea. Like a Phoenix from the ashes, a bank needs to die and reincarnate itself to survive this digital revolution. This theme came up several times. In…

I met a Washington insider this week. During the banter, I mentioned how much better the European authorities are at beating up the US tech giants than the Americans. This is illustrated well by the recent New York Times feature on Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s competition commissioner. Ms. Vestager, 50 and a native of Denmark, is…

The good thing about blogging is that I have a public record of my thinking. Hence, I can claim that Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is mine. That’s because I was presenting the idea ten years ago and blogged about it in February 2009. Now, no idea is unique, and the BaaS idea was purely based upon the…

I’ve got caught in a few discussions recently with people who tell me Ant Financial are Chinese. They’re not. Neither is Alibaba and, if you think they’re just Chinese, you’re going to miss a huge change in the next decade. Ant Financial is an open marketplace of apps, APIs and analytics, that I’ve been describing…

For those who know me they know that I travel a lot and, in those travels, it is fairly obvious that the world is not homogenous. Whilst the Chinese leapfrog the West and move to mobile banking, Europeans are seeing a surge of new banks trying to challenge the old, whilst the USA has megabanks…

I’ve used a statement for a while now about the competitive landscape of finance in the future. It goes something like: Banks have millions of customers, billions of capital and centuries of history, but are hampered by heritage; Start-ups have no customers, little capital and no history, but are driven by vision; whilst Tech giants…

I don’t know how generations think. I only know how my generation thinks, and they call my generation baby boomers. It’s a massive net that catches me, even though I feel like I’m Generation X – a punk and new romancer – but hey, marketing people need their categories. We have Gen X, Gen Y,…

I just listened to a presentation by Nick Thompson, editor-in-chief at Wired, about all things in the future of tech. A lot of it was focused upon Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning towards the end, but the first half was interesting as it focused upon why there is a backlash against Silicon Valley right now. He put…

I’ve been tempted for some time to write a book about how sex is at the heart of commerce, innovation and money. I’ve alluded to it a few times, and particularly noted that the right honourable Jeremy Clarkson sometimes says something intelligent. “Money and rumpy-pumpy (sex) are the twin engines powering everything we do”. He’s…

I just got a report from J Walter Thompson on the future of money and there’s some interesting facts and stats. Here are my headlines: 76% of millennials are looking for new forms of banking 40% of people in their twenties have downloaded a money management app 80% of millennials don’t invest in the stock…