A co-authored commemorative article It all started with a recorded conversation on payments between Panagiotis Kriaris, a well-known Playtech thought leader, and myself on Conversation & Insights. What do payments & ice cream have in common? On Conversation & Insights The ice-cream metaphor inspired Mr. Couchonomics, Arjun Vir Singh to…

It takes an accident or a challenging experience to reflect. The contagion from the closing down of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and crypto-friendly Signature Bank, is not due to the domino effect from a web of derivatives (dragging down interest rate or credit default swap counterparties) or from dumping complicated…

The fintech job market is shrinking following the mass layoffs in the tech sector. I would guess-estimate that the 300k Fintech employer that 2021 CFTE analyzed in their 1st Fintech Job report, has shrunk by around 10%. I couldn’t help myself this week but wonder what type of fintech jobs…

Two recent LinkedIn posts on American Express`s business caught my attention. One was shared by Marcel Van Oost, who’s Connecting the dots in Fintech newsletters and posts are on my daily list, and the other one was by Sam Boboev from Stormpay. Sam Boboev`s post was focused on AMEX`s 5yrs…

In the latest ArkInvest big ideas report, I’m reading that a query on ChatGPT costs about 1 cent. To put this in perspective currently Google search processes about 8,5 billion searches per day. So, it would cost 85 million per day if ChatGPT had to handle the Google search traffic…

3 Incumbents & 2 Stablecoin issuers In case you haven’t noticed, the stablecoin battle is heating up. I’m talking about the dollar-backed stable coins space that has been growing to c. $120B but most importantly, the volume that is being settled on-chain is staggering (read on). Tether continues to be…

This is ChatGPT: 1 million registered users in just 5 days after launch. Less than 3 months later, ChatGPT is crashing continuously because of over-usage. The US market will soon be offered a paid subscription that is expected to be another hit. No other Tech adoption has happened so fast…

Money is fiction, is power, is political, is a way to cooperate with countless strangers, and is adapting to Technological Innovations. Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and philosopher, has stated that money is fiction in the sense that it has no inherent value and exists only as a shared belief. In his book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” he argues that money has allowed for the creation of complex societies…

Davos this year felt back to normal in terms of attendance and intensity. The Spring 2022 edition which was the first one post-COVID was smaller and with less of a vibe. Imagine if the Metaverse tech and hype was there back in 2019. The Burning Man festival did manage to…