Chris Skinner
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Barclays Africa and their co-creation projects
I saw a really interesting presentation in Kigali at the Dot Finance Africa FinTech Summit from Yasaman Hadjibashi, Chief Creation Officer with Barclays Africa (soon to be something else).
The Semantic bank
I’m delighted to be speaking at TNW on May 19 in Amsterdam. I wanted to talk about Digital Human, the theme of my next book, but the guys want me to talk about banking and finance and money, as that’s why they asked me. So I’m going to unveil my first meander around The Semantic Bank.
Solving state corruption with technology
I try to generally avoid making political commentary on the blog as it’s not appropriate. This is a blog about technology and finance, not the economy and politics. Every now and again the two come together such as with Brexit and Donald Trump.
GulfTech is the next big thing
I’ve just returned from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where there were a number of events. Just a few weeks ago, I was in Bahrain, talking at a conference about FinTech as usual. What struck me is the interest and excitement about FinTech in both countries. There’s also a lot of competition between different cities in the region to be a recognised Financial Centre. Bearing in mind that none of these cities were on the map fifteen years ago, it’s quite incredible that today Dubai is the 18th largest Global Financial Centre, one place higher than Frankfurt; Abu Dhabi is 32nd on the list, squeezed in between Dublin and Amsterdam; Doha is number 40, above Stockholm and Jersey; and Bahrain is 58th, above Johannesburg and Copenhagen. Ten years ago, when the first Global Financial Centres Index was produced, Dubai was at number 25 in the charts, and Abu Dhabi, Doha and Bahrain didn’t even make the list.
Western Union: is the future bright or dark?
I was recently hauled up over saying that Western Union (WU) was being disrupted by FinTech. The words that a reader took issue with are, "The high fees of Western Union and other remittance providers were fairly punishing … until FinTech came along."
Russians launder billions through British banks
I recently discovered that there is around $1.6 trillion of money laundering globally and less than 2% is caught by the financial system. That’s a stunning amount and makes you wonder why our system is so awful. Much of it is down to the fact that account openings depend upon physical documentation and human checks. If we could digitalise the whole process, it could be tightened up immensely.
BIS endorse Distributed Ledger Technology 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 last week, and I just read it.
Counterparty payments in seconds is an easy sell
It made me laugh today. I was chairing a panel where Romana Kumar, Head of Global Transaction Banking for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), was discussing their trial of Ripple. The background to this was announced in a press release on 1st February 2017.
The Semantic Regulator (#RegTech Rules)
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?
Bank regulations change every 12 minutes
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 I’ve written before. It’s as John Cryan put it the other day: “Everything regulated tends to continue as it is.”
