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Showing posts from May, 2016

The (asset) bank of the future... and the Matrix's gun rack

I’ve been thinking about the future of money, as you do. I’ve been doing this because I’ve been a bit disappointed by ‘challenger’ banks that have emerged in the UK recently. Why? Because they’re just banks… with a twist! Like they’re just a mobile app. Exciting stuff… but still a version of the storage and transfer of money machines that have existed for more or less two centuries. My thought experiment (ongoing) is about what we’d build if we didn’t have banks but did have our world of perfect information and connectivity. Here’s some semi-structured thoughts about it: Fundamentally (in any economy) I want to earn and use assets that enable me to reach my implicit and explicit life objectives.  Many of those objectives are about daily survival at a level of luxury to which I’m accustomed. Some are longer term and more complex. At the root are assets. Assets are a lot more liquid than they used to be because information about their value is more pervasive, as is informati