Technology

One of the interviewees in my new book ValueWeb is Ron Suber, President of Prosper Marketplace Lending. Ron gave a speech last week which is summarized below. Well worth a read. Marketplace Lending: Evolution of an Asset Class (The following post is excerpted from a keynoted speech I gave at the 2016 LendIt USA conference) Over…

I don’t always want to just repost other documents, but there are 428 pages of reports that came onto my desk this week and I think they’re worth sharing.  The first report is about Fintech trends (316 pages) and Money of the Future by Life.SREDA, INSEAD and Deloitte; the second is all about Digital Disruption:…

There are a number of hotbeds for innovation in finance – London, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley – may all spring to mind to begin with … but what about Berlin and Munich? Yes, Berlin is showing some interesting true colours with three standout start-ups: Fidor, NUMBER26 and solaris.  Two are full banks with banking…

I’ve talked about open sourcing banking and finance by converting everything to components (APIs) that can be plug and played into any front-end user experience (UX) through apps and devices, supported by data analytics, cloud and blockchain to reduce and automate the back office. All of this can be summed up as MoIP: the conversion…

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…

I had a few wake up calls in my years of working in financial services, and a couple of key ones gave me an insight into the mentality of major financial firms that have stayed pretty true ever since.  The first was working with a major bank on a process re-engineering project.  We had narrowed…

Talking of start-ups, I’m often asked: how do you spot a successful start-up?   Not sure why they ask me, as I haven’t started a start-up, but I guess it’s because I’m seeing 100s of start-ups out there.  For example, there were 800 contenders on the shortlist for the Fintech50 this year, and that’s just the…

I had a realisation this week.  The realisation is that banks have always been hot on technology and innovation.  If you don’t think so, then just checkout this blog from April 2008 – eight years ago – where I talk about the rise of innovation in banking.  The context was talking about how banks had created a…

So I just got back from Hong Kong having keynoted at the NextBank FF16 Fintech Finals conference which ran Monday and Tuesday, in partnership with StartmeupHK. A highlight of the week was a fireside chat with Elon Musk, who appeared before a sold out invitation-only audience which I felt lucky to be invited along to,…

One question that crops up regularly is how do we open source the bank, Chris?  The reason is that the bank has built itself over decades through thousands of programmes across hundreds of servers into this massively complex technological spaghetti that cannot be unravelled.  That spaghetti has to be serviced by thousands of programmers and…