Innovation

I bet you were wondering why I hadn’t written an Ant update recently. Well, I thought it was getting too much … but then I just arrived in Hong Kong and the hotel has kindly given me a copy of Fortune magazine with the headline cover page talking about the battle between Alibaba and Tencent….

I keep asking dumb questions like: if the tech giants give away payments, lending and credit for free, how will banks make money? As I’ve regularly blogged, the tech giants don’t want to get into banking per se, but they do want to encourage more traction through their platform by making buying and selling easier….

I sometimes think I’m too harsh on the financial community, with my continual banter about core systems change, lack of digital leadership, inability to see how critical digital is to their future and the impact FinTech is making on global financial structures. I sound like a broken record and rarely post praise of banks. But…

We know that there are lots of new bank start-ups out there, particularly in Europe where names like N26, Bunq, Fidor and Monzo stand out. In particular, the UK’s Monzo bank is notable. It is notable for a variety of reasons – the fastest crowdfunding of a new bank, the achievement of over half a…

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…

Another day talking culture, leadership and change for digital, and a fascinating review of the five things banks mess up when considering partnering. This presentation was from the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) of a major European bank. The presentation was titled How not to screw up my next partnership – 5 lessons we learned, and…

My second and last day at Money2020 Europe was packed with networking, meetings, panel discussions, private events and more. Throughout the day, the themes of the first day kept bubbling over. I guess it was typified with the comment that the CEO of TransferWise announced how happy they are to be partnering with banks. This,…

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…