In the month since I last wrote on this topic, the language around finance has continued to evolve — and it is converging on a point we have been making for years. A recent annual report from Stripe is a high profile voice noting this same shift. The emphasis is on rails, programmability, embedded compliance, and global interoperability — all framed as a app layer challenge. For years, financial innovation concentrated on the surface layer: checkout flows, onboarding journey

Economies in the Global South have an opportunity to reimagine how regional currencies can play a part in balance sheet liquidity

The economies of the Global South I would argue are persistently misread. Western observers project their own financial logic onto systems that operate in fundamentally different ways. When looking at an emerging economy, the instinctive conclusion is that it is “poor” or “capital-scarce.” But that judgment only makes sense inside a system where nearly all economic life is formally captured. In countries such as the UK, almost every adult exists inside the financial system. P

Not all advancement is progress, we’ve lived here unchanged for 300,000 years to think that in the last hundred we’ve somehow gained wisdom and knowledge of the human condition that overwrites all of that time is another symptom of our world losing its ability to think without ego or the self being first. We can and must do better.

Anyone that knows me will know that I’ve never been comfortable saying “I told you so,” but the conversations last week in Davos really do speak to a lot of my thinking and work for the past 10 years; 2025 marked a real change in the geopolitical — and by extension, financial — landscape of the world. Much of my work and many of my conversations over the last decade have been built on the premise that a shift toward a multipolar world was coming. Last year, it felt like that

AI today reflects a narrow Western worldview. This piece argues that true intelligence can only emerge when AI learns from the cultural architectures of the Global South — the majority of humanity that current models barely understand

Yesterday in London, the UK Chancellor stood at the despatch box and delivered what has been variously billed as a responsible budget. The numbers moved around predictably. A few incentives here, much sighing and restraint there. And whilst the media and much of the population are aghast at Rachel Reeves and the labour Government, this budget is little different to the Conservative budgets that preceded it — or those across Europe in recent years. The numbers when used as hea

I was a regular attendee of COP over the past decade in different capacities. I didn’t attend last year or this year, but I’ve been watching with real interest what is unfolding in Brazil. Let me start by saying the world needs good intentions. If everyone who was fortunate enough to be in a position to have the time and space to think of others actually did so, we would all be living in a different world. Good intention is not the whole answer — but it is a necessary beginni

Earlier this week I wrote about social media and coincidentally i was speaking to a friend in New York who has a very cool social media platform. When we were chatting I mentioned A Small World back in the 2000's. She didn't quite understand my reference, being much younger than me. But it made me think about ASW and I spent some time digging out something that I wrote back in maybe 2007. A a time when social media was very new, and the ultimate social media platform was A Sm

Lately I keep coming back to the line from Epictetus — ‘It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.’  It’s a phrase that’s survived 2500 years because it’s true. For me life is, and always has been, a series of unpredictable events. What for one person seems to work out, another seems to always be a struggle. With events interweaved together and with outcomes driven by the behaviours that we adapt to react to them. To this end I’ve been thinking about