Chris Skinner

Money originated as a control mechanism for governments of ancient Sumer to control farmers, based upon shared beliefs.

In conversation with bankers and start-up executives, it is clear that there is a differing view of the world.

There’s been a lot of debate about millennials and their likes and dislikes.

I find it interesting that so many bloggers on financial technology (fintech) sites deride the banks for being slow, clueless or stupid.

A lot of folks are asking me whether I’m really saying that banks need to start all over again? Is that really feasible, Chris? How can you recommend that we tear down the house and rebuild it? Well, there are a lot of reasons I can say this, and believe it.

Banking is not being disrupted; it is being evolved.

JPMorgan Chase recently held their investor day and grabbed some of the fintech headlines when they stated that Apple Pay has been activated by over a million cardholders since its launch in the U.

I realized something about this new market of fintech the other day, where banks become financial systems integrators.

I was having a debate the other day with two bank CEOs.

I have recently spent a lot of time talking about KYC (Know Your Client), AML (Anti Money Laundering, often confused with ALM which is Asset and Liability Management), Client Onboarding, PEPs (Politically Exposed Persons) and SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports).

In the movie The Matrix, the hero Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, meets a mysterious man named Morpheus who tells him that he is just a small part of the Matrix and one of its slaves.

Banks are typically thought of as stable, reliant and dull, or that’s what we would like them to be.

There’s a theme that keeps cropping up at most conferences I attend around the remodeling of banks.

I was sitting through a vendor presentation when a slide popped up titled: “Industry Pain Points.

We recently celebrated the two hundredth birthday of Charles Darwin, who broke through the prejudiced views of the religious world of the Victorian era by being brave enough to say we were descended from apes.

Banks have little to do with physical space anymore; it’s all been digitized.

The buzzword of 2012 was “Big Data,” but what is Big Data and where did the idea come from? Big Data is a term that evolved from the Second World War, when the phrase “Big Science” was used to describe the rapid cycle of changes that occurred in scientific disciplines during and after the war.

There are regular discussions at conferences about the cashless, branchless future.

You can sense an audience’s reaction as you present ideas on innovation.

A bank is a digital business and, as a digital business, can be broken down into pure bits and bytes.

I recently attended a conference where one manager, in a discussion of her bank’s Information Technology (IT) strategy and operations, expressed the commonly held belief that “IT doesn’t speak the language of business.

Innovation is something that comes and goes in banking like chief executives and heads of risk … as in it appears and disappears pretty often.