Grid

Reflecting on the last year, it’s been crazy.  I feel like I’ve spent most of the year jumping on and off airplanes.  Most visited cities are London, for obvious reasons, and Singapore.  I must have been there five or six times this year, and that reflects Singapore’s ambitions to be a Fintech hub.  I’ve also…

It’s amazing how you can feel glee and anger in the same moment or, as I call it, glanger.  I have this so often with technology.  The glee of finding a new app that solves a major pain in your life; the anger when that app freezes and you have to restart your phone to…

I’m relaxing and thinking.  A bad combination.  Just had several sessions with different conferences on Brexit, Open API’s, PSD2, Open Sourcing, Open Banking, Innovation and more … and it all seems like such drivel.  One of the sessions was asking the question: is it time to drop the curtain on innovation theatre?  Yes, for gawds…

I wrote a while ago about the amazing digital identity scheme in India called Aadhaar.  It’s a card-based biometric scheme using a centralised database.  Of course, today, they would have developed the scheme on a mobile wallet with a distributed ledger but hey, you can’t win them all.  Some say that this just illustrates how…

I’ve noticed a great deal of schadenfreude related to the R3 bump.  Lots of people saying that blockchain is past its sell-by date, R3 are bust and distributed ledgers are dead.  I think it’s related to the journalists who, having delighted in bigging up blockchain big time for the past two years are now relishing…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … What do retail customers want? I blogged the other day about too many banks and that there’s not a big enough market for forty of them here in Britain.  It made me think about what do customers really want?  We talk about digital, apps, mobile…

I was intrigued by a comment made by Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, on a panel I chaired the other day.  Anne used to work for ABN Amro, AIB and RBS, and is now a Fintech start-up and her comment went along the lines of: “I’ve now realised that the simple changes I needed…

When I was growing up, America was the superpower that we followed and Russia was in a Cold War.  Today, there are two superpowers – America and China – and Russia is still in a bit of a Cold War that might be thawed by Donald Trump. So when it comes to Fintech, there’s two…

I’ve recently been wowed by series such as House of Cards (Netflix) and The Man in the High Castle (Amazon), and am really blown away by The Crown (Netflix) and The Grand Tour (Amazon).   I’m blown away not because these are good internet shows, which they are, but by the budgets being spent on them….

I talk to a lot of wealth managers and private banks. They want to lead in digital as their clients are the coolest, richest people on the planet.  It used to be that everything for a high net worth (HNW) client was face-to-face; now it’s skype-to-skype; tomorrow it’s machine-to-machine. The large wealth managers, private banks…