Stripe strikes serious success in Sessions
You may not have spotted it this week, but there has been a number of major strategic changes and moves by fintech leader Stripe. I’ve followed Stripe since their founding in 2010, and use them as a poster child of change in finance and technology, as demonstrated by their fast cycle growth from a company…
Digital transformation is more to do with inclusion than banking
Space … the final frontier … these are the voyages of the challenger bank Trekkie. Our mission: to boldly go where no bank has gone before. Today, we landed on planet Earth and decided to look at financial inclusion, and the role of banks in ensuring everyone has access to an account. In some countries,…
The pandemic has changed customer behaviours forever
If you didn’t read my blog last week asking whether the pandemic had transformed banking to be digital forever (answer: no), what is obvious is that the pandemic has changed consumer behaviours forever. This was brought home to me when reading the Forbes-Ipsos survey of American consumers views of digital banking. The survey took place in…
Green finance is becoming a USP
I see five major groups squeezing the financial markets these days. The first one is obvious: it’s the FinTech start-up community, which is now valued as a third of all banking value. The second is clear too: it’s the Big Tech firms like Facebook and Amazon, who are launching their own currencies and putting pressure…
$2 trillion a year sits rotting in bank accounts
This headline caught my attention the other day: Bank loyalty costs savers £1.6 billion a year in missed interest The detail: There’s £246.5 billion ($340 billion) languishing in accounts paying no interest at all … A survey of 2,000 adults across the UK, with 42 percent of respondents stating that they didn’t think it was…
Why do we need banks and branches?
For years, people have argued that you need branches to serve customers for more complex transactions: to serve people who are uncomfortable with digital access; to serve young people getting their first mortgage; to serve retailers and small businesses with their cash needs; and so on and so forth. Baloney. To be honest, I’ve advocated…