The Fourth Age of Man: the Network Age Part of the reason for talking about the history of money in depth this week is as a backdrop to what is happening today. Money originated as a control mechanism for governments of Ancient Sumer to control farmers, based upon shared beliefs. It was then structured during…
The Third Age: The Industrial Revolution The use of money as a means of value exchange, alongside barter, lasted for hundreds of years or, to be more exact, about 4,700 years. During this time, beads, tokens, silver, gold and other commodities were used as money, as well as melted iron and other materials. Perhaps the…
The Second Age of Man: The Invention of Money I’ve blogged about money being invented for sex many times before but hey, it’s a good story, so I’m going to again. So man became civilized and dominant by being able to work in groups of hundreds. This was unique to homo sapiens form of communication, as…
Our main stories of this week includes … ValueWeb: Fintech is building the Internet of Value ValueWeb: How FinTech firms are using bitcoin blockchain and mobile technologies to create the Internet of Value After months of writing and editing, I’m delighted to say that my new book ValueWeb is now available. “Chris Skinner – one of…
ValueWeb: How FinTech firms are using bitcoin blockchain and mobile technologies to create the Internet of Value After months of writing and editing, I’m delighted to say that my new book ValueWeb is now available. “Chris Skinner – one of the most authoritative voices on Fintech anywhere – has provided us another timely and thoughtful…
Flying back from Oslo after the SWIFT Nordics Conference, I was reflecting on the blockchain discussion we had. I chaired the discussion which was titled: “Blockchain: from hype to real world applications” and was joined by Vytautas Karalevicius from Spectro Finance, Lasse Meholm of Nordea and Colin Kwan from Magnr. It is clear that there…
Just had a great discussion about data analytics and visualisation at the SWIFT Nordics Conference in Oslo. During the discussion we talked a lot about data for risk management and how real-time tracking of payments could help identify suspicious activities from fraud and malware attacks to the possibility of AML and sanctions breach. I couldn’t…
I am surprised how many new start-up banks there are in Britain. My list so far includes physical distribution players such as: Santander (a challenger?) that moved to the UK in 2004 with the acquisition of Abbey Banco Sabadell’s acquisition of Lloyds spin-off TSB the soon-to-launch RBS spin off William & Glyn Vernon Hill’s Metro…
BBVA have made another bold move this week, acquiring Holvi. This follows hard on the heels of other significant moves, such as investing $60 million in digital first UK start-up bank Atom and the acquisition of Simple a couple of years ago. From that acquisition, they now have re-hired Simple co-founder Shamir Karkal to build their…
