Technology

I went to see a screening of a new film about Anonymous last night called We Are Legion: the Story of the Hacktivists. The film tells the story about the rise of Anonymous and the hacktivism movement, portrayed through interviews with many of the key players. The film includes some of my favourite discussion areas,…

This week’s TIME Magazine has a spread all about how mobile technologies are changing our world. There are stories of how it’s changing elections, charity, privacy and more, as well as getting rid of our wallets of course. The wallet piece is pretty weak to be honest, with the story of one of their journo’s spending a…

It’s been noteworthy that many banks and exchanges have been facing computer failures recently.  There appears to be more and more of them.  The best known one over here was the RBS glitch, but there have been many more over the past three years: The Flash Crash of 2010  The issues faced by Aussie banks…

Technology develops at a pace and this is no more vividly illustrated than by the Olympic Games, as I discovered in a visit to the BBC’s Olympic theatre yesterday. The BBC has been involved in the Olympics pretty much since they were first established back in 1922 and the Olympic Games are the perfect showcase…

Someone made the comment that I would not receive any business from the five banks named yesterday with the biggest mistakes, so I thought I would rectify that by picking on five good things that banks are doing. It’s harder to find, because it is less reported, but there are a number of banks that…

I liked what Hillary Clinton said about data in yesterday's blog: “Data not only measures progress, it inspires it.” The reason I liked it is that it brought me back to the basics of what I do in banking: data leverage. There’s an old chart we used to knock around about data creating power: The…

I just received a Gallup report for the World Bank about gender differences in bank account usage. The headline is that gender barriers exist worldwide to banking. Hmmm … women are less included in finance than men. Hmmm … my initial reaction was so what? No, I’m no misogynist, but it doesn’t surprise me that…

It used to be that the leaders of our country, media, police, priests and bankers were the most trusted of all. We would follow these influencers like sheep. They would shape our thinking and actions, and control our thoughts and deeds. This has been true since the dawn of time – money was invented by…

There’s a buzz that’s started about Facebook banking asCommonwealth Bank of Australia and ICICI Bank get into Facebook banking apps, with Citibank fast to follow. What’s going on? Originally, we all though Facebook would take over bank functions through stealth creep via Facebook credits. Facebook credits are in fact worth around $1.5 billon a year…