The Top Payments News Stories in February, 2016 2

The payments news stories in February 2016 were all about mobile payments and blockchain. From a mobile payments perspective contactless payments data for 2015 became available in the UK and grew three-fold, we passed the billion (transactional – Mastercard) and trillion (value – Citi) marks, which is a trend which we will undoubtedly see across the ...

The Top Payments News Stories in January, 2016

Payments news in January 2016 pretty much continues where we left off in 2015. And in case you’re not sure where we left off, we can summarise it in 1 word – fintech. The buzz is all about technology and its well worth keeping an eye on the payments trends that consultancies like McKinsey are ...

The 21 Most Popular Tweets from the WEF in Davos 2016 1

The annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos 2016 has instigated plenty of debate and discussion around many of the current and anticipated global trends. The main topic at Davos was the Fourth Industrial Revolution – yep, you heard about it here first! The Economic Forum agenda provides a very informative insight into a range of topics. ...

29 Global Risks from the WEF You Need To Know

To put it mildly it has been an uneasy start to 2016. Global stock markets are plummeting, there are geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe and on the Korean peninsula, a refugee crisis on the European doorstep that has instigated a global debate, horrific terror attacks, concerns about the economic health of China and uncertainty over ...

The World Is In Beta… Eh?!?!? 1

Over the Christmas period, i spent a bit of time reading up on things that i had been putting off for a while. One of those things was to find out what the heck the World Is In Beta is all about. It turned out to be quite interesting, so in this post i have ...

2015: The Major Payments News Stories with an Epic Twist

Its New Years Eve and like many people I’m looking back and pondering on 2015. There are some pretty cool and intelligent fintech and payments news reviews of 2015 (see sources at the end of this post), and so i thought i would offer my own (unique) perspective. In this recap of the top payments ...

The Top Payments News Stories in December, 2015

Here we are on the brink of 2016, and like every month this year i have rounded up the top payments news stories. The main story that seems to have emerged this month is the continued growth of cashless payments. With both Apple Pay and Samsung Pay looking to launch in China next year, Android ...

8 Christmas Myths, 7 Fintech Tales and a Partridge in a Pear Tree 3

Alright, so i am about ready to put on my Christmas jumper and start celebrating the festive season. Before i do i thought i would share some, what i found, interesting Christmas myths alongside a list of popular fintech myths. Myths are often a convenient way of looking at a particular phenomenon which over time ...

16 Global Payments Trends for 2016 by McKinsey 7

Its been an incredible 2015 and many commentators are now looking ahead to forecast what payments trends will be prominent  in 2016. Readers of this blog will know that i follow McKinsey quite a bit and back in October they wrote an article – 16 in 2016: Trailblazing trends in global payments – which i will provide ...

What is the SWIFT Global Payments Innovation Initiative ? 2

For anybody interested in payments and SWIFT, the SWIFT announcement last week of a Global Payments Innovation initiative was hardly a bombshell. In fact with all of the hype around fintech companies eating up incumbents, and the need for traditional financial institutions to become more innovative and attentive to customer demands you could argue that SWIFT ...