What a busy week it’s been so far for David Birch who started the week with an article being published in the latest Journal of Digital Banking, then moderated an event for his good friends over at Modulr and went onto attend the FT’s latest Crypto and Digital Asset Summit with his peers at the Qatar Centre For Global Banking and Finance.
Journal of Digital Banking
In the latest publication of the Journal of Digital Banking, Volume 8 Number 2 (published by Henry Stewart Publications), you can read a paper that David Birch and Kirsty Rutter put together this summer when they set out a possible future for retail banking when Generative AI meets open banking.
The paper is entitled: “Where are the customers’ bots? The AI paradigm shift in retail banking” – This paper looks at the imminent confluence of open finance and artificial intelligence to consider the consequences of giving bots access to consumers’ cash (through open banking, for example). This will mean a world of smart wallets, capable of making decisions on behalf of consumers. They will be capable of deciding what services to use, who to get them from, and how to maximise their financial wellbeing, leaving their users to spend more time on human activities.
You can read a copy of it here.
Modulr’s Gen AI Summit
Modulr hosted an event this week bringing together speakers to discuss the future of payments with Gen AI over a networking breakfast session in White City, London. David Birch was asked to moderate the session featuring:
- Myles Stephenson – Founder and Chief Executive of Modulr
- Ben O’Connor – Receivables Sales Manager at FIS
- Leon Rees – Startups and Venture Capital at Amazon Payment Services
- Anu Widyalankara – Payments Strategy and Technology Lead at EY
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The session began with an update from Modulr’s Scott McGregor and Sean Robertson, reporting on how Modulr have begun incorporating Gen AI across various departments and workflows, from internal project management to customer onboarding.
Next up came the expert panel moderated by David which included debates on what Gen AI may mean for security, customer experience and solving payment pain (with examples as varied as parking your car and vegan meat substitutes).
The FT’s Crypto and Digital Assets Summit: Winter Edition
David Birch attended the FT’s Crypto and Digital Assets Summit: Winter Edition this week with his peers, Dr Rhys Bidder and Dr Roland Gemayel, from the Qatar Centre For Global Banking and Finance. The days’ session looked at how will crypto evolve as regulation intensifies with the latest blow coming with the CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, resigning. The crypto industry promised to bring all kinds of benefits and advantages which are yet to come to fruition in the world of finance. However, some traditional financial institutions ‘making strides into the crypto and digital assets sphere. Can tokenisation take hold in traditional markets? What lessons can be learned from 2023? And what’s the end game for crypto regulators?’ It was a fascinating day, which has left David already rethinking some theories and working on updated ones with his forthcoming book being strongly linked to this space.