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Central banks have been looking at cryptocurrencies for some time not without trepidation. Bank of England and Swedish Riksbank among others have contributed papers and declared their intent to partic...
Ban them? Block them? Back them? Governments and central bankers have long been exercised by the disruptive nonsense of cryptocurrencies. Some countries are actively experimenting with cryptocurrenci...
Years ago, at a banking conference in New Orleans, I attended a presentation by Michael Porter, the legendary Harvard Business School professor of strategy. Porter was presenting his theory of competi...
Reforming a dubious past Can the notorious, high-flying, volatile, and unpredictable Bitcoin system be gainfully deployed for legal and legitimate business models that have the potential of disrupting...
Most of us by now have heard, read, and wondered aloud about the idea and impact of blockchain in its various forms and manifestations on how things are done today. Countless commentaries appear in th...
Deep Blue Sea Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group, was famously cautious about competing head-to-head with the world’s largest player eBay: “eBay is a shark in the ocean. We are a crocodile in the Y...
A noted historian once observed that history is nothing but the unfolding of miscalculation. If this is true, then the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made history on November 8th when he ordere
Getting it wrong Pollsters whose job it is to talk to people and predict the outcomes of elections, sometimes get things badly wrong: the general election in Britain in 2015 when Labour performed une...
Money laundering crimes, when discovered, are dealt with a heavy hand by law enforcement authorities. Record penalties and fines have been imposed on some of the world’s largest institutions held re
Can blockchain or distributed ledger technologies help prevent attacks on the world’s critical financial systems? Banks use standardised electronic messages, made up of codes and identifiers, a sort o...
On July 1st, PayPal the global payments company agreed to acquire Xoom, an online remittance specialist for nearly a billion dollars. Founded in 2001, Xoom is a surprisingly successful digital upstart...