Community

The level of regulation and legislation involved in the room renting business is a little lower than for financial services.

Also need to consider what risk you're taking - having the guts to put consumer deposits at risk probably isn't what you mean here.

wirecard.com, I think?

Distributed ledger as it stands looks good for share registers, land ownership registers - finite lists of identifiable things. 

It's the identity question that needs to be distributed for banking, one that each bank currently answers for itself individually.

Great thought-provoking post.

In general I would have seen gender as something actively not to be considered, trying to avoid issues of discrimination (see EU rules on insurances) but this is real and practical with definite life-changing benefits.

Nice piece. Maybe ties into Nudge theory.

But on the high income people being more rational - isn't it just that high incomes have a greater capacity to absorb present bias? The impact of a daily $3 coffee is relative.

I can't get reception in  my front room ...

Is there any other point being made here?

Halifax is not going to tell a customer "your money is gone, one of our oafs stole it". What the Halifax worker did (allegedly) was steal from a bank. It's the bank's loss, and will come off the P&L. The difference here is one of scale: he handled paper currency and the sum involved wouldn't break my calculator.

When talk turns to trillions (as it does with Jamie Dimon) it's difficult to understand. But banks do have a responsibility to communicate in a way that doesn't involve being completely exasperated at the inability of ordinary people to get it that  a loss of 5 billion is simply a run of the mill business mistake (a la Dimon). "That Kristal and hooker evening was simply a 0.5 bp adjustment to our third quarter earnings" won't win anyone any friends.

Wouldn't want to be using voice recognition in any kind of public place. It wouldn't feel secure to me. And surely it's trivial to steal with decent recording equipment? It might not scale, like in the LinkedIn issue, but it could be directed and personal.

Wasn't step 3 supposed to be done by the rating agencies? They saw all the data (all of it) and summarised it using their massively complex and extremely reliable models, ensuring consistency of assessment and saving the rest of us the trouble.

It wasn't lack of data that punched holes in that process.

I think banks have been competing on security for centuries. Marketing around security of investment and guaranteed returns are the norm. These notions are shorthand for getting a message across to consumers without having to go into the small print of financial detail.

Even architecturally, the main message of banks has been one of solidity - massive stone columns designed to imply impregnability ..

Competing on security is nothing new.