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ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value.  A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what?  That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa. …

One of the gating factors to financial inclusion is the mobile network itself. It sounds simple to say that all of Africa can have access to mobile money, and they can, but if each telco has different wallet structures, charges and fees, then the ease of usage falls sharply. This is why interoperability is a…

I enjoyed much of the discussions at Dot Finance, especially the presentation from Kosta Peric of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Kosta’s been a good friend for some years and features as one of the case study interviews in ValueWeb.  He was also responsible for getting Bill Gates to keynote at SIBOS in 2014,…

Last week I chaired the inaugural Dot Finance Live conference in Nairobi, Kenya.  It is Africa’s premier FinTech event, drawing people from all over the countries of sub-Sahara Africa.  What struck me as I listened to lots of keynotes about mobile innovation and mobile financial inclusion, is that Africa is actually leading the world in…

Our main stories of this week includes … 20% of Europeans would bank with Google, Facebook or Amazon I got an interesting research report this week about consumer attitudes towards banks in Europe: More than a third of European consumers would move bank if they didn’t offer up-to-date technology to aid interaction Nearly a third are…

I got an interesting research report this week about consumer attitudes towards banks in Europe: More than a third of European consumers would move bank if they didn’t offer up-to-date technology to aid interaction Nearly a third are already embracing mobile payments, while a fifth are already using wearables and crypto-currency to pay Almost a…

So there are some clear lessons we can learn as base foundation principles when reimagining banking for the 21st century: Everything is peer-to-peer networked It’s all in real-time globally Commerce is not just person-to-person but more machine-to-machine We are looking at the exchange of value between machines and individuals, not just money Transactions are the…

Another factor of reimagining finance for the internet age is the very nature of person-to-person connectivity and peer-to-peer networking.  These two factors are very different and also different in the nature of how people are connecting.  In the developed world, we have the viral connectivity of the smartphone; in the developing world, we have the…

Our main stories of this week includes … Lessons banks can learn from YouTube (and others) I need a little time to think about my reimagined financial structure, but some of the basics are already in play such as the idea of thinking about value exchange rather than monetary exchange.  Value exchange is based upon the ability…

As we start to reimagine the bank, it is obvious that focus on the platform design and user experience is key, as demonstrated by YouTube.  A second key factor is recognising that the world has changed thanks to the mobile network.  We probably go yea, yea, yea when we talk about mobile, as we’ve all…