Disruption in Retail Banking

Growth in internet and mobile technologies has transformed many industries and economies. The market forces and competitive landscape has completely changed in many sectors. iTunes has fundamentally changed music industry, Amazon has driven most big brick and mortar book sellers out of business, Expedia is one of the worlds' biggest travel company….. the list goes on.

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Don’t Break the Bank: Building for the New Payments Ecosystem

A question we find ourselves asking is how can we deliver on customer experience in a digital payments era? This blog looks to discover that answer! Scalability, availability, and reliability - these are the crucial foundations of payments systems. Without these, we cannot layer additional functionality onto the core services. This is crucial in th...

19 September 2017 /payments

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Financial services: the race to empower customers

Last month the finance ministry announced that Britons could save hundreds of millions a year as credit and debit card fees added to payments will be axed from January 2018. The total value of surcharges for the use of debit and credit cards was estimated at £473 million in 2010. There was an immediate impact with shares in take-away food app Just...

03 August 2017 /retail

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Why the banking model could break the UK economy. Part Two.

In Part One I wrote about the problem with the UK banking model and why it undermines the UK economy. In summary, banks need to lend to make their current account model work; this helps a lot of people, but for a huge swathe society it can be less beneficial, encouraging a debt mentality and a debt spiral that many will never escape, nor repay. In...

31 July 2017 /regulation /retail

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Moral decision-time for the Big Banks

So, imagine you are CEO of a major British bank. You’ve got a problem to wrestle to the ground. Who do you really want to have as your customers? It’s not as easy as saying “anyone”, (which is the response the Regulator and Treasury demand that you give). And it needs to be clearly understood that making any money from current (checking) accoun

15 July 2017 /retail

Sameer Singh Jaini CEO at www.TheDigitalFifth.com

To Hell with Digital

Industries of the future would come out of amalgamation of current industries, which were essentially built in Analog world. All success stories of Digital world have been about re-imagining of the current industries by Digital mavericks. Customers, as of today, have to install multiple applications for handling financial relationships (typically ...

26 May 2017 /retail

Anne Leslie-Bini CEO at Pikcio RegTech

Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems: it’s time to incentivise purpose in banking

“I want to create a lender that people don't hate” said Denise Kingsmill, the chair of the board at U.K. challenger bank Monzo. Now there’s a pithy declaration that speaks volumes about the state of the banking industry and the times we live in. But how should we read this: are her comments simply savvy market positioning, tapping into the desider...

01 May 2017 /regulation /retail

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What Does MasterCard’s Biometric Chip Mean for Consumers?

Have you heard the news? In an ongoing attempt to fight back against those wishing to do financial harm to their customers, Mastercard is beginning a trial of a card which has a chip, along with a fingerprint reader, which would serve as a biometric authentication process. According to Mastercard, the card has already seen trials in South Africa v...

27 April 2017 /security

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Bitcoin ETF Bites the Dust, Needs More Security

When the SEC, last month, announced the proposal from Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust was declined, they made a clear statement to the cryptocurrency community: more security is needed. In their terms, they did not "find the proposal to be consistent with Section 6(b)(5) of the Exchange Act, which requires, among other things, that the rules of a nat...

23 April 2017 /regulation

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Paperless Digital ?

The terms Digital / Paperless / Straight thruough processing / seamless customer experience etc have been around for quite sometime. As customers we have begun to assume and expect it now all the time. Therefore I was quite taken aback by a recent experience with a reputed large global multi national bank with a plush office when I applied for a c...

21 April 2017

Anuj Kumar UK Financial Service Strategy Lead at SAP UK

Employee 360: Real time Possibilities

Go paintballing and one experiences frenzied energy. You duck and dive but those balls of paint just keep coming. You seek help; make a strategy and an execution plan but it all fails when the enemy comes with full force. You play on, get bruised, exhausted and soon the winning or losing just doesn't matter. All in all, one hopes it's all been wor...

27 March 2017