In most science fiction movies, there is no money. The Hollywood visions of the future have wiped out the need for cash, and I’ve blogged before about Gene Roddenberry’s views on money in Star Trek: “Money is a terrible thing”. His idea is that money will disappear as we approach space and, as we send rockets…
So everyone’s excited about Fintech, but Fintech is nothing new. Fintech is actually pretty old. I could claim that if Fintech is about providing technology platforms to exchange finance, then that’s been around since banks first implemented technology platforms in the 1960s. In fact, I do claim that banks are Fintech companies. They are the…
I’ve been stunned by the rise of P2P lending and crowdfunding, with Goldman Sachs (download their PDF white paper) predicting that it’s going to eat 7% of bank profits from the credit markets over the next five years and 14% over the next ten. Goldman Sachs states ‘We see the largest risk of disintermediation by…
Following our regular weekly interview, the Finanser talks this week with one of Europe’s fastest growing unicorns, Klarna, in conversation with co-founder and Deputy CEO Niklas Adalberth, To begin with, perhaps you can tell me how you and your colleagues came up with the idea of Klarna. Sure. When we started this company, the entire…
For the past two months, Wired has published a detailed account of how the FBI, DEA and other US authorities tracked and traced Ross Ulbricht, the libertarian founder and owner of the Silk Road. For those who have not heard of it, Silk Road is the notorious website that exploited the dark net to sell…
One of the readers of the Finanser saw my write-up on asset and wealth management, and asked if I could talk about what’s happening in investment banking. Answer: yes, I can. It’s more difficult to see the Fintech stars and unicorns in the investment space however, as it’s more opaque having been disrupted by technology…
What happens when the cost of payments reaches zero, the speed of payments is instant, and everyone globally can make and take a payment, what happens then? I just had an interesting chat with someone and realised two things: one is that we’re talking about moving away from batch to real-time, and that’s where the…
Yesterday I said something better change, and it is. This blog has covered extensively how things are changing in payments, retail and commercial banking, but I haven’t covered investment banking or asset management as much. So here's an insight sourced from yesterday's Financial Times. According to a poll of 400 senior executives by State Street, the custodian…
I picked up a few amazing quotes this week. The first was someone telling me about the payments conference they attended where one of the large UK banks (HBOS, part of Lloyds Banking Group) said that their customers were now moving to mobile only. Apparently, in the last yaer, one in five of their customers…
