Technology

I was talking with a few FinTech firms the other day. They are all fully licensed banks, and are less than 15 years old. They all seem to have one thing in common: refreshment. What I mean by this is that they talk about technology in a very different way to traditional banks.  Traditional banks,…

A year ago, I wrote a piece about Fin and Tech being like Father and Son. The thing that I was noting is the chasm between bank leadership teams, who are generally men over 50, and FinTech startups, who typically have young visionaries and significant diversity. It’s a theme I’ve returned to regularly. It is…

I was talking to a group of Treasury folks and the guy before me gave a pitch about the CFO of the future.  The pitch focused upon how the CFO would be managing risk, incorporating different technologies, managing M&A, dealing with globalisation and so on and so forth.  I couldn’t help but sit there and…

A long time ago, a man would go to work whilst the woman would stay at home. Thanks to a generation of change, women and men now work and no one has to stay at home. A long time ago, work was a place you went to and home was a place you rested.  Thanks…

I was struck by some commentary with John Cryan, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, over on Bloomberg. The article is talking about the wild ride he has had since taking over the helm of the bank which had formerly been run by two CEOs (Juergen Fitschen and Anshu Jain). He knew when he took over…

I was interviewed by UBS’s wealth management team a month ago, when the bitcoin bubble was in full bloom. The price had exploded, tripling in a month. Now that it has burst, the interview seems quite prescient so, here it is … UBS interview with Chris Skinner Cryptocurrencies – digital currencies based on encryption –…

One company that is seeking global domination is Ant Financial. The company has an open stated intention to reach two billion users by 2025.  The way in which they’ll achieve that is through local partnerships, and many of those have been started already: Ant Financial invests in Thailand’s Ascend Money as part of global expansion…

The British Bankers’ Association released their The Way We Bank annual report last Thursday. It was interesting. Here are the key highlights: Over the past five years customers’ activity on banking apps rocketed by 354%, with apps now an increasingly popular way to access current accounts rising from 21% of access in 2012 to 61%…

It’s a decade since the iPhone launched.  Steve Jobs unveiled the new phone on January 9th, 2007. The first iPhones were made available to the grubby hands of the public on June 29th, 2007, exactly ten years ago today.  This was originally just for American consumers with the UK, France, and Germany following in November…

I just got back from the ICEEfest in Bucharest, Romania.  It’s a fantastic expo organised by Dragos Stanca and his team, and was very enjoyable even with the master of ceremonies, Jeff Leach, taking the mickey out of me.  Jeff is an actor and comedian, and spent the whole conference f-bombing the speakers and the…