We are living through the third great revolution in modern business. The first revolution automated administration through mainframes and databases. The second digitised services through smartphones, apps, APIs and cloud. The third revolution is now intelligence: machines that can write, analyse, reason, create and increasingly act on our behalf. That is why so many people…
I was thinking more about this third revolution of financial technologies. The first was very much focused upon automation administration using mainframe computing; the second moved from pure cost reduction to the changing dynamics of how to leverage productivity and cost using the network effects of connectivity, and driven by cloud and mobile; the third…
Now that Intelligent Bank has finally launched during my trip to China with Hauwei, here is more about what it means, as written by an AI friend … Intelligent Bank: The Third Financial Technology Revolution argues that banking is entering a third major era of technological change. The first revolution was automation, driven by mainframes, SWIFT, Visa…
I spent last week in China with Huawei. It was fantastic and, finally, it gave me the chance to announce and release my new book Intelligent Bank. Regular blog readers will know that I’ve been talking about this as the third fintech revolution but I could not officially tell everyone that it was released until today! Here is…
What is a Sputnik moment? A Sputnik moment is the moment the world suddenly wakes up and realises someone else may have leapt ahead technologically. The phrase comes from 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, into space. Technically, it was just a metal sphere orbiting the Earth. Politically and psychologically,…
I spent the morning thinking about the bank of the future. It’s something I do every day. You could be simple and say that it’s embedded, invisible, everywhere, all the time. And that is true. But that is today’s bank, not tomorrows. I then have this debate about currencies. What currency do we believe in?…
I gave a keynote this week about my new book called The Intelligent Bank, which is offically launching next week in China! Walking off stage afterwards I realised something quite important: we are no longer debating the future of banking. We are living through it. The problem is that many banks still think the conversation…
Over the past decade, the industry has aggressively optimised for cost and digital efficiency and, in doing so, it has quietly dismantled the human infrastructure that made banking work for millions of people. Start with the facts. In the UK alone, more than 6,000 bank branches have closed since 2015, according to consumer groups and…
I’ve just been reading McKinsey’s latest piece about the AI-powered bank. It reads like a polite consulting report, but underneath it is a fairly brutal critique of the entire banking industry because what they’re really saying – without saying it – is that most banks are structurally incapable of benefiting from AI. It not because…
I remember making a prediction twenty-five years ago that all of the biggest banks in the world would be Chinese. Unfortunately, I made this prediction at an American banking conference, when all of the biggest banks in the world were American. Twenty-five years earlier, or fifty years ago, all of the biggest banks were Japanese….
