Latest opinions that Alex Noble has shared on Finextra

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Alex Noble

Account Director

McAfee

Member since

10 Jan 2008

Location

London

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Alex's opinions

Securing the Blockchain

[Please note these are my personal views and should not be assumed to be the offical position of my employer] This is an exciting time for Blockchain and there is no shortage of hype. Over the past few months there has been a barrage of blockchain news and the BitCoin price has made it into the coverage of the traditional media. There’s also been...

10 November 2017 /security Trends in Financial Services

Identity, verification and blockchains

It’s been a while since I last blogged. Since then, one of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time on is the concept of ID&V, especially the challenge of joining the “ID” (identity) and “V” (verification) elements. I’ve been able to spend rather less time on blockchains and shared ledger technology, but following a couple of excellent sess...

08 November 2016 Innovation in Financial Services

What does HSBC’s adoption of voice biometrics tell us about trends in identity, customers and contac

Wanting a change from Brexit articles (too many of them are just too much speculation), I was looking back at some of the news stories from earlier in the year that I’d meant to blog on but hadn’t managed to. One of those was HSBC UK’s introduction of voice biometrics (see Finextra: “HSBC to roll out voice and Touch ID to 15 million UK customers”)...

14 July 2016 /security /retail Innovation in Financial Services

Law, territory and the Blockchain in Financial Services

I'm finding that I'm having very productive discussions with lawyers as ideas mature on how blockchain could be used in financial services I should stress that I'm a technologist rather than a lawyer – a student job at a firm of Edinburgh solicitors rapidly demonstrated that Scots law was not for me. However, if you wish to build a blockchain archi...

20 November 2015 Innovation in Financial Services

New York vs London at the Barclays FinTech Accelerators - 5 things I’ve learnt

It’s been fascinating having the equivalent of a ringside seat for the London and New York rounds of the Barclays Techstars Accelerator. The two cities have some of the most innovative FinTech start-ups and some of the more supportive government and digitisation environments. [Disclosure: I’ve been one of the start-up mentors partnering with Ba...

22 October 2015 /retail Innovation in Financial Services

How UK payments were changed by London Transport

Payments are evolving at a staggering rate. Yet despite the hype around the new payment methods, the way a 150 year old transport network has driven payments adoption is perhaps as significant. The adoption of contactless by London’s transport network has been one of the understated but major drivers of the adoption of contactless technology in th...

17 September 2015 /payments /retail Innovation in Financial Services

The quiet FinTech revolution: Insurance

To say there is “hype” around FinTech doesn’t do justice to the some of the rather breathless reports that have recently been appearing. Some of this is a genuine feeling (bothin media and industry) that FinTech is where the internet was in the mid-90s, and no-one wants to miss that level of potential. Part of it, at least in my view, is that any s...

20 July 2015 Innovation in Financial Services

What would widespread crypto-currency mean for Greece?

Today’s situation in Greece is bad for all parties and for once the media are using word “unprecedented” correctly. There have been currency union crises before (such as the Latin Monetary Union, from which Greece was expelled in 1908 for debasing its gold coinage) and banking crises before. Yet it is possible that this may be one of the last fina...

07 July 2015 Innovation in Financial Services

If mobile is the future, where are the telco’s?

There’s a sense of inevitability about today’s announcement from the BBA, that in Britain customers are predominantly using mobile banking. Customers like to be able to do their basic transactions quickly, easily and conveniently – and the smartphone in your pocket with an app from your bank offers all three. The rise of mobile banking has been a ...

15 June 2015 /retail Innovation in Financial Services

Customer insight, election polling and why don’t branches have more success in customer surveys?

Current customer experience research shows that (whenever asked) consumers state that they like bank branches and prefer banks with branches. Yet the evidence of their behaviour and mobile adoption rates suggests otherwise. Obviously, there’s a parallel here with this month’s UK general election, where the result predicted by the polls did not mat...

13 May 2015 /retail Innovation in Financial Services

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