Ant Financial’s Strategy for AI, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and more
I’ve been flying around a bit and was lucky enough to find myself onstage the other day, chairing the Ant Financial Technology Forum at Money20/20 Singapore. I was honoured to accept to be the moderator of the afternoon and guess I was chosen because Alipay and Ant Financial are a 30,000 word in-depth case study…
What’s next for blockchain?
I recently wrote an article for Bloomberg’s Business Week, and thought it worth sharing with y’all here: What’s next for blockchain? Everyone got very excited a few years ago about blockchain technologies, the ledger system that was spawned by the arrival of bitcoin in 2009. It allows the recording of transactions to be automated and…
Why bitcoin is not a ‘fraud’ or ‘bubble’, but something you should take seriously
Unless you have been asleep for the last year, you cannot have failed to catch the buzz around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether and Ripple’s XRP. There are even some coins that were created as a joke that are getting significant investments, such as Dogecoin. Dogecoin was created as a way to…
The real financial plans of the tech titans (#GAFA #BAT)
In my blog yesterday, I talked about the technology titans being liked and potentially trusted with money, but I still don’t think they will open full-service banking. Instead, I think they will focus upon full-service information. The reason I say this is that they don’t want to be banks, it is not core, but they…
How does a financial curator make money?
After my blog yesterday, about banks having to move from being control freaks in a proprietary operation building everything to becoming collaborative partners in an open marketplace curating everything, I was asked: “how do you make money out of curation?” It’s a good question, as marketplace curators make money very differently from proprietary product providers. …
BIS endorse Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for payments clearing and settlement
I’ve just been alerted by friend Gijs Boudewijn to the release of a fascinating white paper by BIS, the Bank for International Settlements (the guys who do Basel stuff and are big cohonez in banking circles). Their Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: an analytical framework…
web 5.0, the 2030s and Samantha
There’s a line in the 2013 film Her, it’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness. The film is about Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Theodore is a lonely writer who gets to trial a new operating system OS1, the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system. The OS1 tailors itself to your habits and…
web 4.0, the 2020s and the Internet of Things
We are already entering the fourth-generation internet, the internet of things, but it won’t really take off until the next decade, the 2020s. Sure, we have self-driving Teslas and Nest home appliances, along with Samsung’s Smart Things, but it’s not mainstream yet. For example, none of my friends has a self-driving car yet. This will…
web 3.0, the 2010s and an internet of markets
Now we move onto the third-generation internet, web 3.0. What is web 3.0? It’s not been well defined or described. Many would say it’s the internet of things, but I disagree. The internet of things is emerging, but it cannot exist until a bridge between the mobile social network and the internet of things has…