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A year ago, I believed UK Open Banking payments were on a roll. Total payment initiations for 2022 were 68 million payments, an increase of 171% over 2021, showing a strong foundation for Open Banking...
There is much written about CBDCs but little on the risks to society a CBDC would create. I see these risks falling into three categories: 1. economic 2. financial 3. human rights Economic Risks The k...
Bitcoin at 50k USD In March 2018 I posted a Finextra blog “Bitcoin at 50,000 USD”. It was framed as a scenario rather than a prediction and I observed that no-one could possibly know with any certaint...
1230 words, 4:50 min read An Orwellian Dystopia As more and more payments become digital, a key question for payment systems architects is how to preserve the privacy of their users. Without privacy, ...
1200 words, 4.5 minute read Central bank balance sheets are ballooning the world over, and in parallel, adoption of shared ledgers using blockchain is accelerating. These major shifts indicate the glo...
770 words, 3 minute read The Wirecard debacle has hit the headlines with a vengeance, begging the question: flawed regulation or flawed Fintech models? On first appearance, it feels like that there is...
(560 words 2 min 30s read) In November 2019 I blogged about how programmable value is the future of financial services. However, it is evident from reactions I have had that the concept and implicatio...
The Original Premiere – The Dot.com Boom Remember the dot.com boom? You need to be over 40 to have direct experience of it from the start, so here’s a recap. It began in the mid-90s with the realisati...
About 3% of the money supply in the UK is made up of physical notes, the rest is electronic money held on computer systems. Globally, about 8% of the world’s money is cash, 92% is electronic.* With th...
Domestic Payment Interoperability – A Fading Prospect Cross-border interoperability of domestic real-time payments systems was a hot topic a few years ago, but seems to have gone off the boil – possib...
On 25 March 2018, a Quantas 787-9 Dreamliner touched down at Heathrow airport to inaugurate a new non-stop service between Australia and London. It cut a full three hours off the normal 20 hour journe...
Bitcoin’s price averaged $272 in 2015, $567 in 2016 and $4,001 in 2017. It peaked at just below $20,0000 in mid-December 2017. So far in 2018, as of mid-March, the average is just over $11,000. Bitcoi...