Chris Skinner

One person in seven has no access to formal financial services. One person in six lives with a disability. We normally think of these as two separate inclusion challenges. They are not. They are the same problem. Financial systems were designed around a single type of customer, leaving millions of others behind. For decades, financial...

Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite the opposite. PayPal still moves almost $2 trillion every year, serves around 440 million active...

I was recently interviewed for a podcast about Agentic AI in payments and finance. Here's how the interview went:

This week’s main blog discussions include … PayPal, Stripe and Adyen: three companies, three futures Back in 2021, PayPal was worth around $360 billion. Today it is worth closer to $50 billion. That’s one of the biggest destructions of market value we’ve seen in fintech, and yet it isn’t because the company stopped growing. Quite...

You’ve been thinking about cryptocurrencies all wrong. Every few months someone declares that cryptocurrency is dead. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to recording every one of those predictions. The latest panic is bitcoin’s price falling below $65,000 and Coinbase reporting weaker revenues. A few months earlier everyone was predicting Bitcoin would hit $200,000. Before...

Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It is making finance, communication, work and everyday life adapt to people, rather than forcing people to adapt to systems.

I just came across a useful paper on the SUERF website: Tokenised deposits: old wine in new bottles? by Alistair Milne of Loughborough University The paper focuses upon whether tokenised bank deposits are actually doing anything new? His answer is sometimes, but nowhere near as much as the hype suggests. The starting point is the...

This week’s main blog discussions include … Innovators, Imitators and Idiots Warren Buffett observed years ago that every market eventually sorts itself into three groups: innovators, imitators and idiots. It is deliberately unfair but, like most good aphorisms, it contains more than a grain of truth. The innovators invent something genuinely new. The imitators wait until...

For decades, the architecture of money was reasonably easy to understand. Banks held the money, central banks sat at the heart of national monetary systems, card networks connected merchants and consumers, and SWIFT connected banks across borders. It was complicated behind the scenes, but the basic structure had been remarkably stable for years. Then the...

For years, banks have worried about technology companies eating their lunch. Fintech would destroy banking. BigTech would become banking. Digital wallets would disintermediate banks. Cryptocurrencies would replace banks. Stablecoins would replace deposits. Decentralised finance would replace everything. None of that quite happened. Now we have artificial intelligence and, this time, there may be a very...