I listened to the Waters Wavelength podcast’s episode on the Australian Stock Exchange’s decision to halt their long-running project to replace Chess, their old post-trade system, with a blockchain-based platform.…
Meri, Meri, quite contreri
Tag: finance
I came across a funny parallel to my old career in publishing at work. In publishing people talk about gate-keeping – how publishers act as a filter between the universe…
When you have children, you play a round of Russian Roulette every morning. BAM! Someone is sick and you have to take the day off work. Clearly, the more children…
I have a new job that’s all about fintech. You will probably know roughly what that is if you have been reading around finance, entrepreneurship, innovation and such lately. Or, frankly, if you’ve been awake in a place like London in the last few years. My definition is ‘disruptive, technology-based businesses in financial services’.
You are also likely to be a customer of at least one fintech company, as last year an estimated 2/3rds of all banking customers were using a fintech service. For me it’s ClearScore for checking my credit score for free and TransferWise for sending money cheaply to Finland (since I have you here, have a code for a free transfer).
In short, you can’t have avoided hearing about one of the most active areas of the startup scene in London and globally. You may be asking yourself, when will all this blow over? When will there be just Jack Daniels and dating ads on the Tube again? To answer that I have analysed the main drivers fuelling the revolution using a 2×2 matrix, below – I’m not an MBA for nothing, hey. On the vertical axis is the impact or the level of disruption caused by it, and the horizontal axis shows whether a driver is likely to become less important over time or is here to stay. Spoiler: fintech is not going away.
I’m working on a project on stock exchanges, and while trying to find out how many there were in the world, I discovered that it’s very difficult to find a complete list that is up to date. So I made one! (There are about 240.) I have made an effort to weed out dead ones, check for broken links, etc, but if you spot any mistakes or exchanges that are missing, please tell me in the comments or email me.
You can see the list here, or download an Excel version here.
When I started my MBA elective of Behavioural Finance recently, my husband told me to mentally prepare to let go the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). I scoffed at this. I love EMH, and it was taught to me by my favourite professor who knows everything. Back off. But as the course progressed, I could feel certain foundational beliefs start crumbling… by the end I was beaten. Long live behavioural finance.
It has been six months and a bit, and I’m halfway through my MBA. What have I learned?