It’s Insurance but not as we know it.

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Five top tips for service transformation

Sometimes a trend is more than a trend; it’s an entire reinvention of the status quo. We’ve seen it happen in banking, where FinTechs have redefined customer service, customer experience, and innovation, with considerable agility. They’re bringing fresh ideas, relevance, and personalisation to customer service. For a close look at how banks and building societies are making sense of the wide array of new technologies to drive innovative new business models check out www.innovation-model.com. This is a comprehensive dive into future technologies from myself and my DXC colleague David Rimmer.

Once shunned by traditionalists, these organisations are now stimulating those same doubters into reassessing the way they do business. If they don’t reassess, the new stark reality in a fast-paced market sector is that they will lose customers and they will lose them fast. The lessons learned through this shake-up period in banking should now be well heeded by insurance companies, because the disruptors are now already here in insurance. It’s time for insurers to evaluate where their efforts should be channelled to retain customers, and to set about attracting new ones in new and highly relevant ways.

In this blog I’m taking a look at what’s happening in InsurTech and exploring five initial strategic areas that established insurers might do well to consider taking to capture the InsurTech benefits and protect their business base at the same time. As far as reinvention goes, it is currently estimated that investment in InsurTech in the UK has grown to three times the 2015 investment level to stand at around £16.5 million for 2016 so far.

What is InsurTech?

InsurTech is history repeating itself. By that I mean that the name is just a handy way of referring to the banking FinTech phenomenon in its insurance industry guise.

Like banking, insurance has done very nicely over the last century. It was doing so nicely in fact, and so low were customer expectations, that there was no need for fundamental change right up until the age of digitisation came along and drove automation, opened up new channels, and made customer self-service possible.

Now, with InsurTech, comes the real opportunity but also an underlying threat. Customer expectations are for more interaction, faster response and personalisation. As an example of how quickly the sector is shaping up the Insurance magazine, Insurance Business, reports that the start-up Buzzmove has attracted £6 million in funding led by White Mountains Insurance Group.

We are seeing other examples too: hourly car insurance by Cuuva and the peer to peer insurance collective from Guevara. About 16% of auto insurance contracts sold and renewed in Italy by the fourth quarter of 2015 featured in-vehicle telematics, with growth outpacing even online insurance sales. Italy may seem a strange place to be leading the innovation race but leading it is: the insurance group, UnipolSai now has a third of its car insurance customers connected to telematics.

As far as the underlying threat is concerned, insurers can turn to history to understand what traps not to fall into. With the inception of FinTech many traditional financial services organisations viewed the new ideas and challenges initially as an inconvenience. They then perceived them as a threat. Only very slowly did they start to grasp the mutual benefit that could come from collaboration with these new companies and their seemingly revolutionary ideas about products and customer service.

Some insurers might feel that exploring innovation could prove a costly diversion of investment budgets and management attention. Whilst many watch with admiration at the set-up of incubator funds and digital garages, other insurers have questioned the pace and direction of such moves. Common questions are:

Will my customer base really shift that strongly to digital channels?

And…

doesn’t this create a two-track culture and organisation that will ultimately fail?

InsurTech is the future in terms of customer experience and engagement through digital channels. Here are five preparatory areas to consider…

1.    Determine what innovations are right for your business

From the example of the FinTech revolution we know that doing nothing is not an option; business does not function as usual when everything about the environment it operates in is unusual. But whilst innovation is about change it also needs to recognise where each organisation is starting from: its culture, assets and focus. Not every company wants to be the Facebook of its sector; there is a lot of opportunity between here and there. It’s worth pointing out that – after what may have seemed to many to be a long time with nothing notable happening – there has been an explosion of innovation in Insurance from new business models (and entrants such as Lemonade) which really puts Insurance at the nexus of innovation in Financial Services. Blockchain, digital applications, API development, mobile technologies, telematics, real time analytics, digital garages, and partnerships with new start-ups, not to mention a host of others all offer potential. Decisions need to be taken about where most impact needs to be and can be made, as Insurance truly is a hotspot for innovation at the moment.

2.    Build the team and ecosystem to drive momentum

Some insurers have started to bring in lateral thinking talent from outside the industry, from areas such as gaming. Spread your net wide. With technology and the internet making its imprint across all industry sectors there is no one sector that cannot impart enormous lessons to others. It’s not just old business models that may need reassessment, but old recruitment models too:

  • Build a core team with sponsorship and funding to ‘think the unthinkable’
  • Engage with partners to add new thinking
  • Create review panels to test ideas, challenge the status quo, accelerate the great ideas, and “fail fast then move on” where needed
  • Use the excitement to drive positive cultural change throughout the organisation.

3.    Security concerns

Nobody needs to be advised to keep security at the top of the agenda but, just to be safe, keep security at the top of the agenda. Assess all new developments, apps, and systems for security vulnerabilities now, and then build into future design.

The hacker world is evolving and getting more organised. State sponsored hacking groups are in operation in countries such as China and Russia, in attempts to exploit weaknesses in UK company systems. Yahoo has recently stated that data on around 500 million users was stolen by state-sponsored hackers in ‘what could be the largest publicly disclosed cyber-breach in history’. Private groups also hold companies to ransom with DDoS threats.

Organisations involved in any way with regular and widespread financial transactions, such as the receipt of monthly premiums for example, are on the radar of the bad guys. So too are companies with mountains of personal customer data. These are not the only threat, however. For insurers it’s not just a financial issue. The effect on brand perceptions among customers can be severely damaging if they feel your systems are ‘weak’ enough to leave their own information exposed. All insurers would be well advised to conduct a threat and vulnerability assessment at the earliest opportunity and then make it a regular priority task.

4.    Create the infrastructure to support the new world

With any big shift of the nature of InsurTech there will be companies that are hampered by existing legacy technology not capable of supporting or integrating with new digital apps.

Few companies though have the luxury of starting afresh. The optimum strategy revolves around the creation of a hybrid infrastructure that spans public cloud such as AWS or Azure, as well as a secure, regulator-approved Private Cloud and then an optimised legacy environment, all under a single broker and management layer with flexible consumption based pricing.

5.    Create investment headroom

The pace is set. It will be fast. To many it will have come about unanticipated, which is why it is so important to think about shaping up for the InsurTech opportunity now. Few companies will have free funds that were idly tucked away waiting for a reason to be.

Create headroom via cost reduction in the existing set-up and creative refinancing of existing assets. In parallel with capitalising on InsurTech, organisations need to instigate programmes to take cost out of traditional operations and drive the shift to lower cost digital channels. Such a move would also serve to refinance existing IT investments to create funds for InsurTech investments.

Strange days

Much has been said about wearables and compute technology for people the ‘Internet of Humans’.  People are activley discussing the eventual possibility of indigestible sensors for monitoring the health of individuals in a fashion not dissimilar to how telematics-based technologies monitor car health and impact car insurance policies. Stranger things have happened and are set to happen. It’s going to be a great journey; see you there.

Abridged from a post first published on LinkedIn February 2017

Don’t think outside the box – sort out

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Essential first steps

Security and monetisation are the cornerstones of a robust API strategy. To ensure that these fundamentals are rock solid, any FSI organisation needs to assess its maturity model at the outset; in other words, now. This involves gaining certainty about how you intend to run your APIs, who they will be exposed to, how you will secure data at each exposure level, and how you can work with a new revenue function.

I’ve talked about APIs before from the perspective of how Open Banking Standards are creating exciting opportunities for the banking industry. In my conversations with industry leaders I still encounter occasional hesitation and this is nearly always based on justified concerns around security.

Any organisation that has consistently and responsibly invested vast sums in protecting its data and meeting the requirements of the regulators is likely to feel apprehensive about the notion of offering outsider access into its systems. One of the factors behind this feeling is that the financial services sector is now regularly shaken by news of fresh and increasingly ingenious hacker intrusion. So it’s only natural that a sense of trepidation pervades the boardroom.

Nervous or not the fact remains that, within any organisation, those who are charged with exploring and exploiting the API opportunity are facing new security challenges. They need to encourage the bank to open up and think differently about data and the commercial value it can deliver, shaping the bank to retain and reinforce its relevance in the future. Openness entails exterior access to data, in the form of APIs.

De-risk your API strategy

Best practice is to address security arrangements now, before plunging into the world of opportunity that APIs offer. It will create risks and complications if you decide to put it all in place once your API ecosystem is up and running.

At the same time it’s best to also address your strategy around monetisation; identify the areas and potential partnerships where you believe you will be best positioned to add value, attract commercial tie-ins, and increase revenues. Simply making your APIs available will not result in others beating a path to your door. There is an outside chance that it might, but you need to decide now how you can take the first important steps to meeting opportunity halfway.

Structuring the API

Banks do not have to provide access to all data to all comers. PSD2 will be mandating the types of information that banks will be obliged to share but there will still be a high degree of choice around the matter when it comes to going deep down into the vaults and announcing open house.

Layer your security in accordance with the objectives of each API. An API will expose a range of data which comprises a range of commercial values to others. Some will be merely functional and of no great commercial value, but simply composite information in the whole story. Other data will contain the gems, the reason organisations will want to deal with you in the first place. You should look to monetise some data whilst leaving other parts freely available. Once again, this is an essential first step, not a bolt-on. Once you make these distinctions, the security infrastructure should support the business model. Much of the security focus is ensuring the APIs are structured in three modes, to ensure that the appropriate level of data is exposed to authorised users:

  • Open Public APIs (not a great amount of sensitive data here, fairly mundane) e.g. the types of accounts a bank operates
  • Private APIs (these require additional security, log in credentials)
  • Internal: only to an organisation

Security and access to these APIs is managed by encryption keys, assigned to the authorised entity (person, app etc.). Effectively there is far less risk to customer data and privacy than is involved in exposing anonymised data which can be analysed by powerful algorithms.

The age of bigger thinking

Believe it or not, how you perceive APIs will also have a bearing on how effective your strategies will be for making the most of them, realising their commercial value. Traditional organisations have been caught on the hop before by new developments that have initially been all too easy to disregard and endeavour to marginalise by nonchalantly underestimating their significance.

There has been a lot of talk recently about FinTech cooperation; the model is changing. FinTechs were largely ignored by traditional players for a while. Then they made significant inroads to the market very quickly and were then viewed as a threat. They disrupted the sector.

Now disruption has entered into the mainstream and many traditional players are learning from and collaborating with organisations to which they once wouldn’t have given the time of day. These disruptors have a high agility factor and an unrestricted approach to what’s possible – through sheer imagination and innovation. They have demonstrated to longer-standing organisations just how quickly fresh revenue can be accessed by taking highly relevant customer services to market and crafting the customer experience to reflect the modern lifestyle.

Not just another slot-in system

If you perceive APIs as an integration issue you need to get back to the drawing board pretty pronto. APIs bring a level of flexibility and dynamism to a bank’s systems that has not been seen before. To optimise these benefits, any approach that seeks simply to find the right connectors to link them into other systems will be missing both the point and the opportunity (whilst also creating a huge amount of re-work and realignment at a later stage).

My emphasis in this blog is that the first steps absolutely have to be well-planned. Forgive me for returning to the much used and oft-maligned analogy of a ‘journey’ but APIs are exactly that.

The train will shortly be pulling out of the station and if you’re not on board now it will be a very risky manoeuvre to try to open the doors and jump on once it’s in motion.

Integration involves tightly bound and coupled data, supporting connected systems. Being an API provider, which is how financial organisations should perceive themselves, is about providing external access to data. Its focus is accessibility. Any commercial partner should be able to access the data, as long as it qualifies in terms of security, regulation, and payment capabilities.

Where to now?

The API ecosystem is sitting there waiting for innovators to piece together the business opportunity that best suits their models and their customers. This is not a task that should be shunted over to IT just because APIs have an overwhelmingly technological ring to them. Bear in mind that the considerations of how individual APIs can be manipulated to expose sensitive data while ensuring security is not a normally a consideration of the IT development team.

One of the recurrent themes in the conversations I have with financial sector decision makers is in first identifying their current API Adoption maturity and then working with them to create their roadmap. ‘Comfort zone’ is a phrase for the history books. It’s time to board the train.

Forst published on LinkedIn December 2016

Open Banking Standards: forcing the gates of the walled garden open

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Defenders of old faiths

In a world where tradition is highly valued, as in the haloed portals of many of the longer-standing financial institutions, a lack of passion around technology within senior management serves to perpetuate confidence in the status quo and a view that gathering storms will simply pass on by.

Banks need to move closer to their customers in a way that reflects the average
citizen’s comfortable interaction with mobile technology and the increasing assimilation of connected capabilities into everyday life. It’s an opportunity for new interactions designed in the way the customer wants them; easy, accessible, on the move.  Yet it appears to be with less than clamorous enthusiasm that the sector greets the Open Banking Working Group’s recommendations on the Open Banking Standard.

Let’s freshen up

Meanwhile, innovators are embracing new business models built on leveraging internal and external third party APIs to create services and products. In her speech at FinTech Week earlier in 2016, Economic Secretary Harriett Baldwin welcomed the initiative and explained that it would enable banks to “design phone apps which help customers manage their money better.”

The Open Data Institute outlines the customer benefits of the new standard in the following way:

“If consumers could give an approved price comparison service explicit and limited permission to access their bank account data across an open API, they could simply and quickly find the best option to suit their needs”.

This is an initiative that will cause many to reassess their business models. Or, at least, it should. It represents an exciting opportunity for the banking industry to make some truly potent changes that would delight customers, benefit the banks themselves and freshen up the face of banking for many years to come – new traditions in the making. Now banks have the chance to introduce systems that gather really actionable data; behavioural insights that create a platform for predictive modelling. The old tradition would have been to ‘shoe-horn’ customers into categories that the banks wanted them to be in; most closely corresponding to the existing product portfolio. The new approach is to create services based on customer insights; responsiveness to what customers want rather than bullishness about what the bank happens to offer.

In a world where challenge, invention and bold new approaches are valued, as in and around the electrified centres of innovation coming into the market as FinTechs, the very course being chartered is straight into the eye of the storm; where the action is, and the high growth-potential customers are. These are the customers who are themselves embracing the same technology that FinTechs are embracing.

Back in traditional banking land, however, all is calm, tranquil and conceivably even lethargic. Accenture reports that only 3% of CEOs and 6% of board directors from leading banks have professional technology experience. Perhaps it’s not so much about lethargy, and more about simple, basic unfamiliarity?

Accenture’s group chief executive of Financial Services, Richard Lumb, says:

“ FinTech, cyber-security, IT resilience and technology implications of regulatory changes have all become critical board-level issues but many bank boards simply don’t have adequate expertise to assess these issues and make decisions about strategy, investment and how best to allocate technology resources.”

Chris Skinner (The Finanser) and Matthias Kröner (CEO, Fidor Bank) have made some great points in the Fireside Chat , the Future of Financial Services, they recorded at IFGS2016 recently. Kröner reminds us all that there was a time, not too long ago, when the sole purpose of tech in banking was to decrease costs, and possibly to gain efficiency increases here and there. FinTech has brought the realisation for the first time that tech can be used to reinforce the unique selling proposition. The big challenge for banks, suggests Skinner, is to change the core back office because it is crammed full of legacy. Accenture’s Lumb says:

“ Banks need to change boardroom culture through a combination of deep technology expertise and also much-improved understanding of the impact of technology among other board members”

Genius unchained

It is highly possible that the issue of slower innovation in established financial institutions is exacerbated by the way internal IT teams are structured and motivated within banks.

Much of their work is focused on keeping the lights on or endeavoring to effect major shifts and migrations to new technologies in a mass fashion; one that lacks the agility of the nimbler FinTech.

Imagine if…approaches to liven up thinking among the internal development team included tasking them with competitive KPIs to bring experiments and prototypes to the table quickly – could this be a way for technology specialists within the bank to flex their expertise and knowledge of the banking systems and apply new thinking to old models?

Thinking outside the bank

The bigger issue behind such initiatives as Open Banking Standards is about nurturing a culture of innovation and creating the environment for it to thrive in; one where cost concerns neither constrain nor define creative, aggressive, disruptive thinking. Within the UK, the banks are next door neighbours to one of the most innovative and passionate tech communities in the world: Silicon Roundabout. Imagine if banks took advantage of the proximity of talent, and the vast resource pool, with which they rub shoulders? The mind-set that richly pervades the atmosphere down at the end of Old Street must surely be accessible from Bishopsgate?

FinTechs are learning the language of traditional banking fast. Compliance and Regulatory documentation is no longer a secret language that only old banks can speak. They can no longer rely on the knowledge and experiences of the old ways to protect their future. Open Banking Standards is the catalyst for this change. Accept it. Embrace it. And show the world why the UK is right to lay claim to being the leader in financial services innovation.

First published on LinkedIn June 2016.

Blockchain and the case of the Purloined Panama Papers

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First Published on LinkedIn April 2016

For most of us, I would guess, Panama until recently represented three things: a hat, a canal and a rather good palindrome. Now, it has suddenly forced itself into our consciousness with a tale of tax evasion/avoidance that has reached the cover of satirical magazines. Not only that, unless I tread carefully, this blog may result in a number of redactions.

The information that Mossack Fonseca would rather have kept under its hat incorporates 11.5m documents and 2.6 terabytes of information including the financial details of 12 national leaders, 131 other politicians and associates, twenty-three sanctioned people and 214,000 companies.

Now of course, most of these people have probably done everything by the book, and there may well be relatively few miscreants. However, in these days of Twitter storms and cynicism, we all need to be cleaner than clean. So the key question is – how can Governments and Banks reduce the chance of it ever happening again to this scale?

The answer may be as simple as embracing the blockchain technology.

To many people, blockchain is the same as Bitcoin, but although the two are closely linked, they are distinct concepts. One way of looking at the two is to think of them in terms of a railway. Consider blockchain as the rails on which trains and their carriages ride, while numerous types of transactions, one of which is bitcoin, represent the carriages themselves. More technically, blockchain is a decentralised ledger, duplicated across a global network, which records the existence of the bitcoin (as well as other transactions). This allows any individual, institute or even a government such as the Tax Office to see a true record of all transactions, and enables information to be stored securely in the Cloud.

Blockchain – it’s worth getting excited about

Many banks still see blockchain as simply representing a risk to their position as intermediaries in the transaction handling process, in which they add value and take a cut for providing that value. For me, this is a blinkered view.

Here’s the thing.  It’s the level of certainty that an individual ledger can’t be manipulated fraudulently (since the network needs to validate and approve each entry and modification) which allows users, whether individuals or institutions, to trust blockchain implicitly. And that gives rise to a whole lot of exciting ideas of recognising its far greater potential, in both business and governmental contexts.

Imagine if, for example, blockchain became the heart of the voting system in the US, so avoiding the controversies of the 2000 and 2004 elections. It could easily happen. Nasdaq, for example, is already using blockchain to allow Estonians to vote in shareholder meetings even when they’re abroad. Meanwhile, in 2014 Denmark’s Liberal Alliance became the first political party to vote using a blockchain-based system for its internal elections. Similar systems have since been adopted in Norway and Spain.

Combining the security and flexibility of blockchain with the power of PSD2 (you may have seen this covered more fully in my colleague David Rimmer’s article) will give people more ability to manage all aspects of their financial profile, from savings and transactions to their full range of assets, using a unique personal identity such as an ID card and protected via technology such as ShoCard.

Digital currency – a tempting alternative

Imagine if countries moved over to digital instead of traditional currency. It’s a possibility already being investigated by a number of governments, who are now looking at whether replacing coins and notes could improve financial performance and economic health.

A report by the Treasury in March 2015 pointed out that although

‘digital currencies can offer a degree of anonymity to users, and that this factor could be a driver of criminal activity[…] the publically visible ledger (or blockchain) of historical transactions makes digital currency payments less opaque than traditional payment methods, especially cash.’

Visibility of these transactions, in fact, will allow agreed users to check that the customer/citizen is not fraudulently making or receiving payments.

The potential extends still further. Imagine if the tax office could have a view of all transactions being made without relying on the citizen submitting their returns at the end of each year. Good news for both David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn.

Give blockchain the scope it needs

I’ve one concern. blockchain is exciting – but the financial sector should not limit itself to protecting its own interests. Already, a number of consortia have started to deliberate over their approach to blockchain, and as exBarclays IT chief Anthony Watson says:

‘ The blockchain […] blows up banks’ business models because they can’t charge people the same astronomical fees. So they’re forming this to block people. And that’s all it is, it’s a cynical tactic to block people and stop people innovating.’

Agreed, you can take this viewpoint with a grain of salt, given Anthony’s new venture’s involvement in the technology. Blythe Masters, for example, of Digital Asset Holdings, believes that it could be under 2 years before financial services companies use blockchain technology. Even so, if financial services – and in particular the consortia – continue to drag their heels, there is a risk that blockchain may never achieve all that it could.

So let’s think bigger. Let’s think trust and security. Let’s think customer satisfaction, or the national wellbeing, and see where this takes us. Its got to be better than the current solutions. What do you think?

FinTech – Learning to love change

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In her recent introduction to FinTech Week, Harriett Baldwin, MP for West Worcestershire and Economic Secretary to @HMTreasury expresses her vision in no uncertain terms: ‘This week has two key aims. The first is to celebrate our status as a leading global FinTech hub… Second, we know that if we are to remain a leading global FinTech hub, we need to go further, be more progressive, more ambitious, more far-reaching.’

They’re strong words; an exciting concept. But I think FinTech Week’s remit goes even further than being a showcase for FinTechs to show their capabilities. It’s a tacit recognition of the role and value that FinTechs represent to the financial community at large. Or at least, what they could represent.

You may have spotted a clue in Harriett’s FinTech Week introduction (if you missed it, here it is again: the need to foster ‘greater collaboration between FinTechs and traditional financial services firms’).

It’s a change in perception, though, and it’s easier said and done. FinTechs and traditional players have been at it like Tom and Jerry since Fintech first emerged, and the tension – perhaps even suspicion – has been palpable. There does seem to be some give and take now, however, since the FSI establishment appears to have acknowledged that FinTech businesses have a right to exist on the same planet.

Come on, come on, let’s work together

With the Fourth Industrial Revolution knocking at the door like a particularly excited and peckish wolf, creating new collaborative ecosystems is paramount, and these need to be based around a symbiotic model where everyone does what they’re best at. A startup FinTech is agile, flexible and innovative. They aren’t as hidebound and constrained by regulation and legacy infrastructure. So let them help offer frictionless customer experiences across digital and physical touch points, streamline and automate basic services, leverage mobile devices and create better insight and new revenue streams from data. Meanwhile, the establishment has three major advantages over startups: data, brand trust (while acknowledging that in some cases trust can have been hard-won and easy-lost, making heritage into a double-edged sword) and deep knowledge of the banking systems.

Some global banks are tapping into this, by either investing in start-ups or setting up their own incubators. It may be costly and difficult to manage, but the pre-existing willingness to partner with the new guard means that relying on IT providers isn’t a shock to the system. And as former Group CIO at Deutsche Bank Tony McCarthy said in October last year:

‘if you don’t figure out new ways to work and new ways to partner, you don’t stand a chance.’

(I found it ironic, incidentally, that during FinTech Week, Pitch10 offered innovative startups the chance to present their business ideas to a delegation from Government and Tech Businesses at No 10, yet the Advisory Panel didn’t include a single old-style bank or building society, nor was there a legislator to be seen.)

The new rules of the game

Harriett’s article also indicates a belief that regulation needs to be looked at if the new ecosystem is to flourish.

I agree.

Thanks to the velocity of change, regulators are way behind the curve, and I can sympathise with their position. Financial Services are complex enough before you introduce an enhanced potential for global competition, let alone before the regulators start getting their head round technology. A failure to read the needs correctly could mean killing innovation stone dead or opening the back door sufficiently for all hell to break loose. So how can they keep up and protect customers? It’s a question which we’ll be trying to answer over the next few weeks.

A case in point is cryptocurrencies: a recent report by the IMF launched during WEF at Davos (Virtual Currencies and Beyond: Initial Considerations) states that ‘The potential for rapid change in the financial industry engendered by VCs is a challenge for financial regulators and supervisors. The challenge… has often turned on finding a balance between addressing the risks and vulnerabilities posed by VCs while not stifling innovation.’

Test and test again

Incidentally, Dan Schulman of PayPal suggested at WEF that a Sandbox environment could enable the establishment and FinTech to share data and experiment with new technologies and ideas in a way that enabled the regulators to have better visibility. It’s an idea which I feel has a lot of appeal and needs to be explored further – and fast.

What’s that coming over the hill?

There are a couple of technologies worth looking at in more detail, not least because they are likely to have a major effect on the industry. The first one, which has massive and exciting potential is BlockChain. As John Cryan, CEO of Deutsche Bank said at Davos,

‘BlockChain has the potential for digital identity – if governments will adopt it’.

Certainly, the waters have been muddied by Silk Road and Bitcoin, but given the way in which the technology has been developed over the last 25 years, like P2P (Peer-to-Peer) lending, BlockChain has plenty of capacity to drive more far-reaching social change. I’ll be considering their challenges and the opportunities they’re set to open up in the sector, in future blogs.

Also upon the event horizon – and it’s something which I believe will have a huge impact on the sector – is the Open Banking Standard Framework. Created in part to comply with changes in EU law, the framework will enable customers to receive their data over the internet and easily, safely and securely share it with third parties, improving competition and efficiency, and stimulate innovation. Again, I’ll be looking at it more closely in a future blog.

Deciding on your future business model
With so many technologies, innovations and potential business models, you may find our recent report ‘FinTech Innovation Model 2015 – Technologies for the future’ useful. This looks at the key factors and essential steps which should be taken. It outlines the extent to which different technologies have been adopted by FSIs, the impact of new business models and how to grasp new technology’s opportunities. You can view it here.

I’d also really like to hear your views on the speed at which regulation should be introduced to FinTechs. For example, should we test in advance, or should we hold our breath until problems appear in real life?

First blog post

First blog post

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This is my very first post on this new site.  I have been posting some articles on Linked for a while and greatly enjoyed it.  Now I think is the time to try enforces some self discipline (if I have a site maybe I’ll be more likely to post) and hopefully what I produce will be informative, useful and maybe a little humorous.

I am going to start by posting the articles I have been posting on LinkedIn over the last 18 months.  I am already working on what I want to post next so I should be able to get some new content out soon.

Well that’s it, I hope you enjoy what you find here and I hope that my sometimes irreverent take on how business and technology align (or not) doesn’t offend anyone.

Enjoy 🙂