Innovation

I’ve blogged for a while now about the different approaches to Big Tech in China and America. In China, Big Tech is pretty much working hand-in-hand with government to solve society’s issues and police them. People in the West may not like it or understand it, but Big Brotherly Love works in China for the…

Like quite a few big banks, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has been messing about with doing digital by launching a number of new initiatives. The two of most note are Bó, a new retail bank, and Mettle, a service for small to medium enterprises (SMEs).* What fascinates me here, however, is the headline…

Bill Gates said in the early 1990s that “we need banking but we don’t need banks anymore”. He was wrong. I hosted a banking seminar in the late 1990s where David Llewellyn, a Professor of Money, stood up and stated that “there will be more change in the next five years in banking than we’ve…

I recently was invited to be the keynote at some innovation awards in Ireland. It got me thinking about what innovation means in finance, so here are the notes from my speech. I trust it’s useful …   Thank you for inviting me here to join you here for the first Innovation Awards in Dublin….

It’s been interesting to watch the development of Facebook’s Libra project. As I expected, regulators hate it and are asking lots of questions about it. Most seem to want to ban it. And now PayPal has dropped out of the original founding team, with Visa and MasterCard rumoured to follow. What’s also been interesting is…

I was recently asked by Volante Technologies to consider what being a digital bank means, specifically for a commercial bank and, even more specifically, the bank’s payments and treasury services. After all most of the focus on digital banking and digital payments has been in the retail sector, where consumers are already accustomed to seamless…

I was talking with a senior banker, who told me that he was in charge of the Artificial Intelligence program in the bank. I was impressed as he is part of the executive leadership team of the bank and not the CIO. We have invested widely across the board in AI, he told me, and…

My mate Ron Shevlin is on good form these days. He’s written quite a few columns on Forbes that are clickbait: Customers don’t want digital banking The FinTech fast follower fallacy (which I spotted just after writing this yesterday) His latest created quite a twitter furore and was targeted at Monzo’s launch in the USA….

Watching the BBC, I often see reports on the elderly being ripped off, scammed and targeted by fraudsters. Here’s just a few recent ones: Hidden ‘shame’ of elderly scam victims – BBC News Reports of frauds on the elderly are ‘tip of iceberg’ – BBC News Bank staff ‘saving elderly from scams’ – BBC News…

It was Earth Day on Monday, and a national holiday in many nations as they observed what Christians call Easter. Whilst Sri Lankans mourned the fatal losses on the Easter Sunday church gatherings, many observed the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. One of the leading lights of the modern environmental…