I wrote a while ago about the contrast between the innovators (jeans and beers) and regulators (suits and canapés) and was struck by this again as I attended EBADay in Amsterdam. Like SIBOS, EBADay is attended by the best people in transaction banking and payments, and they all wear suits and ties. The focus of…
One of my good connections via social media is Huy Nguyen Trieu. Huy writes a regular blog at Disruptive Finance, as well as being a Managing Director for Macro Structuring at Citi. He posted something in the last week that I felt was worth re-posting here as a guest blog. Read and weep. If you can’t…
There’s an interesting debate about blockchains, sidechains and identity taking place that is emergent right now but, soon, will be mainstream. For those who are unclear about these things, blockchain is the technology protocol invented by Satoshi Nakamoto with bitcoin, although it doesn’t have to be based upon bitcoin. The blockchain allows you to create…
Just to finish off my contention that banking is not being disrupted, just evolved or adapted if you prefer, it’s worth a thought about what would it take to cause a disruption. First, I don’t think of disruption in a dictionary sense but in the sense that Clayton Christensen meant it in the book The…
Quite often, with attribution, I let other websites cut and paste this blog onto their own. American Banker did that recently but changed the title of the blog from The reports of my bank's death are greatly exaggerated to Like Airlines and Pharma, Banking’s Too Big to Disrupt*. In so doing, the intent of the original…
Building on the discussion of data being key to disruption, I often use the phrase ‘digital core’ in this context. Therefore, I was intrigued when someone asked for a definition of a ‘digital core’ and one of the replies was there isn’t a core anymore. I wondered what they meant and, in explanation, they referred to…
I’ve heard a lot of talk this morning about Big Data at a conference here in Barcelona, and had a realisation half way through. The conversation was all about the move from mass markets and customer segmentation to the market of one and peer-to-peer personalisation. In other words the deep data mining demanded by Don…
I’ve written a lot about incumbents versus startups lately and noted with interest that Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to JPMorgan shareholders picks up on this theme (not as a direct result I’m sure?). He talks about “hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives to traditional banking” and that “the…
Whilst debating whether new fintech startups would eat the banker's lunch yesterday, I stumbled across a really interesting read by Philippe Gelis, co-founder and CEO of FX firm Kantox. It was so good that I asked Philippe if I could put it on the blog and he kindly agreed. Read and enjoy … Why Fintech…
