Technology

I got a chart this week that made me smile. This is it … In one month, retail sales jumped massively from 16% to 27% of all sales. The end of main street is nigh. Other facts and figures that made me smile were Amazon’s retail sales jumping 26% in Q1 2020, Zoom moving from…

I remember some years ago that Nikolas Sarkozy wanted to bring in a law that would force call centre operators to tell French citizens where they were located, due to the backlash over offshore call centres. I wonder what he would make of today’s world, where most French and European banks have given all their…

The non-stop coverage of coronavirus, global markets slumping, an economic armageddon, the end of the world due to a climate emergency, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice, rising of the oceans, weather fatalities, a farce of a US election, the UK and EU in a stand-off over Brexit, the cancellation of the Olympics…

Really interesting interview with Garry Kasparov in Wired magazine about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the future. Garry Kasparov is perhaps the greatest chess player in history. For almost two decades after becoming world champion in 1985, he dominated the game. Then, in 1997, at the height of his powers, Kasparov was crushed by an…

We had our first 2020 meetings of Nordic Finance Innovation last week. The theme was digital transformation and its implementation, and was co-hosted by our partner Swedbank. One of the slides struck me as particularly noteworthy. It came from a presentation by Stephan Erne, Chief Digital Officer at Handelsbanken, in reference to artificial intelligence (AI)….

I bumped into a real API marketplace the other day. Just what I’ve been looking for … … but not sure why they’re opening physical stores pic.twitter.com/NaUUiyQ4lK — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) February 17, 2020 It gained a few nice comments like: “So people could stock up on spaghetti code and sandbox toys” from Alex Kuznetsov;…

I often talk about how banks have five times more regulation than technology firms. That stat comes from Bank of America Merrill Lynch who published this chart a while ago: This is confirmed by similar charts, such as this one from Benedict Evans, a Partner at the firm Andreessen Horowitz, who just shared his Davos…

Regular readers of the blog know that I’m a fanboy of Alibaba and their financial firm Ant Financial which operates Alipay, the major payments system of China. On November 11, they had their Singles Day jamboree. The equivalent in China of Black Friday, some say, but more than five times bigger*. The figures this year…

I’ve said for a while that the Big Tech giants will not become banks. Amazon and Alibaba will do a lot of bank-like activities, but they will never move into full-service banking, as in offering deposit accounts. Why won’t they? Because that’s full banking activity which has all of the audit and compliance overhead that…

I was talking with a senior banker, who told me that he was in charge of the Artificial Intelligence program in the bank. I was impressed as he is part of the executive leadership team of the bank and not the CIO. We have invested widely across the board in AI, he told me, and…