It is against the backdrop of a very sobering statistic relating to 600 technology outages between September 2018 and October 2018 that the FCA declared that enough was enough.
It wasn’t just the big banks either, with their patchwork quilt of legacy systems held together by slender threads, some customers of the ‘challenger’ banks could not access their accounts while abroad last August.
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I have just read Charlie Westons’ great piece in the Indo on Credit Unions and the incoming changes to lending for the sector.
An announcement was made yesterday of a change to the legal framework restricting credit unions from charging more than 12.7% on loans. The move is perceived to be a welcome step forward for the Credit Union industry in Ireland as they struggle to lend. With €17.1 billion in assets and €4.5 billion lent out to members, the loan to asset ratio is 23% down on what it used to be.
Yes, you are reading this correctly. The Credit Union movement have shown trillion dollar businesses how it’s done. For the fourth year in row Credit Unions have come out on top in the Customer Experience awards. So while bank branches are being shut and the whole world scrambles to get on line and cut costs by reducing the number of touch points for their customers, the community finance specialists demonstrate how the personal touch still wins out.
I was pretty shocked when I read the article below today..
Being an techie obsessed with seeing what went wrong coupled with a desire to see how things such as this can be fixed, I immediately thought of two things security and blockchain.
I have, of late, given a few talks on blockchain technology and the overwhelming response when presented with the ‘B’ word is either one of confusion mixed with unqualified and uninformed excitement or deep scepticism and suspicion.
Never before has a technology divided people to this extent.
I am intrigued. What if all the nation states were to come together and agree on adopting a single currency that could be used all over the world?
What would it look like? Who would own it? How could it be used?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while.