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From the origins of the internet in 1990, the end of the 1990s saw the emergence of e-commerce and a plethora of payments services and commercial websites.  Then not a great deal happened until the internet became social.  Blog platforms like WordPress and Typepad emerged in 2003; Facebook launched in 2004; and YouTube a year…

Web 1.0 – the network begins As mentioned yesterday, almost half a century of developments in technology led to the launch of the web as we know it today, following Tim Berners-Lee’s paper detailing HTML and URLs.  This was in 1990 and, consequently, the internet morphs almost every decade.  This makes our decade – the…

The last chapter of ValueWeb talks about what comes after the third generation internet: the internet of value.  This is the internet being built today, based upon shared ledgers, cloud, apps, APIs and analytics.  Of course, the next generation is the internet of things.  But what comes after that? There is an answer, but you…

A bank has to make a regulatory change every 12 minutes.  That’s some task.  A bigger question must also be: how can a regulatory check that a bank is compliant with their regulatory changes, if their regulations change every 12 minutes are run to 1,000’s of pages? The answer is they can’t, but they don’t…

I recently spent a day in a meeting discussing Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) … yawn.  Well, it is a bit of a dull area, but highly important.  In fact, what gets me is that regulations are the big ticket barrier to change in banking.  It’s what protects the banks from disruption and change, as…

OK, OK, OK, I promise to stop posting predictions and trends and blah, blah, blah, but this one has an interesting provenance and history.  Last year, one of my most read blog entries was this one: The top ten trends in banking innovation  (February 2016).  This was a summary of the top trends in banking innovation, and…

I’ve been wondering for a while how so many companies can be starting up something in the same space, and how are they surviving?  The reason for mentioning it is that we keep hearing these numbers around how many billions are being invested in FinTech, bitcoin, blockchain and such like, and yet I cannot see…

So one of my 2017 forecasts is coming true already: it is the year that blockchain moves out of proofs of concept and work and into the mainstream.  Two great examples broke out this week from skunk works to media. The first I spotted was the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group using bitcoin for various…