What we get wrong about innovation

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The recipe for success (in cross-border change management)

I was personally very happy to see in 2018 the development of the blockchain agenda. For example, what started as a joint venture between IBM and Maersk, seems to recently have made its pace towards a more organized approach to tackle the trade digitization agenda with Tradelens, which announced in August that they had 94 companies in its early adopters program [1] . Check out BitPesa, Trustchain… in other words, the market slowly but surely has been able to pass the techno hype phase and is considering the first real life value-add examples. Taking a step back from the last 3,5 years of #SWIFTgpi I think the same can be said about cross-border payments: for long anchored in its traditional ways, after years of both hype (blockchain), and innovative closed loop solutions (e.g. Transferwise) plus the ongoing threat from retail market innovation and GAFAs entering the banking market, the correspondent banking community came to a point where something had to be done. Here, ever...

How the #SWIFTgpi roadmap came to be; from one-hit wonder to an industry change agent

As the summer break comes to an end and we enter the next phase of the professional year in the northern hemisphere, it is the best moment to make, with a fresh and rested mind, a recollection of the road so far as well as what will be our own next drivers and directions. If you’re not doing this, you’re doing it wrong. I watched this summer a TED talk by Professor Angela Lee Duckworth on grit, the power of passion and perseverance . It sounded intimately familiar and reminded me of the last 3 years with the #SWIFTgpi initiative as a particular recent example. Back in Jan 2016, at the moment when we were closing the gpi rulebook to enter the pilot phase, we felt that what had been achieved was not a one-off, the end of the line. We had momentum with the banking community, positive feedback and bankers asking us “what is the next step?”. We felt that that momentum could be lost would we wait 1Y for the end of the pilot phase to look at additional opportunities. As soon as t...

How the gpi came to be

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) was founded in 1973 as a way for banks to standardise the exchange of financial transactions. Its shared data processing system and worldwide communications network form today the backbone of the financial system. In the last two decades, information technology has developed tremendously, and with it, the expectations of consumers. Social media, digital experiences and the sharing economy are re-shaping domestic markets. Disruption is there the key word: technology start-ups are being created on an ongoing basis, trying to provide simpler, fully digital experiences by disrupting the established business models, often helped by regulators which are trying to spur innovation and competition. Banks are not insensitive to this context and domestic banking, under pressure for a decade now, has seen a fundamental reshape towards self-service and digital, integrated experiences. Cross-border payments h...

How gpi’s UETR disrupts cross-border payments

Tim Hartford’s excellent column on the @FT this summer on IT innovation “What we get wrong about technology” https://www.ft.com/content/32c31874-610b-11e7-8814-0ac7eb84e5f1 begins with an ominous paragraph: “Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook”. So much can be said about the UETR, SWIFT gpi’s (universally) Unique End-to-End Reference, when considering financial transactions. For starters, the UETR in itself is cheap to produce: the references can be generated by anyone, without need for a central issuance authority. The specification for the UETR is based on a well-known Internet standard ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier ) so if you want one you can just go to https://www.uuidgenerator.net/version4 or use the appropriate function if coding in many modern languages. Even tried and tested mainframe technology can churn out a UETR when “persuaded” the right way. A ...

Transaction Banking transformation: do bankers dream of electric sheep ?

The future of banking has, as with the iPad, been dreamed out already decades ago. Science fiction writers such as Peter F Hamilton or Iain M Banks showed us a future of banking which ranges from now trivial things such as video calling with your banker, to more developed imaginations such as neural interfaces, artificial intelligences defending secure crypto-locked networks and remote will execution via time-coded cryptographically secure instruction envelopes. Also, such future is closer than you think: scientists are already experimenting with neural interfaces for lost human limbs with some degree of success [1][2], people are writing about artificial intelligences not needing to develop beyond a certain level [3] and blockchain [4] and recent internet communication events [5] are launching a new golden era of cryptography. But this is still in the ‘potentially happening’ realm space; the here and now (and how did we get here) is a little bit more tricky and challenging. ...