Brett King Quotes

In 2013, Alibaba’s money fund Yu’e Bao (“leftover treasure”) was launched and marketed to users of Alipay. They then expanded into banking in 2015, launching MyBank during the summer and, in an audacious move, opened their bank capabilities to other Chinese banks through an open marketplace of apps and APIs.

The banking system we have today is a direct descendent of banking from the Middle Ages. The Medici family in Florence, Italy, arguably created the formal structure of the bank that we still retain today, after many developments. The paper currency we have today is an iteration on coins used before the first century. Today’s payments networks are iterations on the 12th century European network of the Knights Templar, who used to securely move money around for banks, royalty and wealthy aristocrats of the period. The debit cards we have today are iterations on the bank passbook that you might have owned if you had had a bank account in the year 1850. Apple Pay is itself an iteration on the debit card—effectively a tokenised version of the plastic artifact reproduced inside an iPhone. And bank branches? Well, they haven’t materially changed since the oldest bank in the world, Monte Dei Paschi de Sienna, opened their doors to the public 750 years ago.

I have read thousands of pages of robot uprising stories, and think our chances of getting through the next few hundred years intact are slim, and that the sooner we start treating robots with respect, the better.

My six-year-old son Thomas won’t need a driver’s licence to own a car and it’s highly likely he won’t even own a car; he’ll simply rent car “time” instead. Throughout his entire life, he will never be without a smart device which will soon tell him when to go to the doctor for advice (and his insurer will require him to wear it), he’ll live in a smart house where robots clean and fridges or a household AI order groceries (delivered by a robot), he’ll never use a plastic card or chequebook to pay for anything (and likely no cash either) and he’ll interact with hundreds of computers every day that won’t have a mouse or keyboard. Thomas is part of the so-called Generation Z which is growing up in a world so dramatically different from the world that their grandparents were born into that if you had predicted these changes 100 years ago, it would have simply been called science fiction.

Too often new initiatives coming into a bank are perceived culturally as a threat because of the change it forces, and the bank reacts like an immune system attacking a virus.

We’re taught from a very young age that to degrade the empire is to degrade the king, so saying the words out loud is treasonous.

If the institution were to step back from the day-to-day operations and actually look at how a customer interacts with them, they’d realise that from a product, process and channel perspective, the customer is totally agnostic. They just want to get their banking task done...

To put that in perspective, between 1838, when the oldest known photograph was taken, and the year 2000 some 85 billion photos were taken, but we generate the same number of photos every 90 days or less today.2

For now, he wanted to help Ena escape the dragon fae king's wrath. As soon as Prince Grotto learned what she was about to do in the worst way. The reason she was in this mess was because Brett had helped take Princess Alicia prisoner. As Alicia's reward for saving the Princess, Alicia's grandfather had declared that Ena would wed Alicia's cousin. He was a dangerous dragon fae. Sure Ena would become a Princess if she were to wed Prince Grotto. Brett also knew that the fae intended to use her for her special skills and terminate her when she proved useless. Brett wasn't sure how to help Ena move her gold and staff to somewhere safe. Hopefully, in the Hawk Fae kingdom. They didn't have U-Haul trucks in the fae world. She was a dragon and that meant she wasn't leaving without her horde of treasure.

That led through feasibility to successful pilot, to this gigantic system that you see now, which is utterly stunning. The way it works is this: When you get a phone that has M-Pesa, you basically have an extra menu in your phone, which says, “Send money.” If I wanted to send you some money, I would choose the menu on my phone which says, “Brett”; I put in the amount of money I want to send; I put in a PIN; I hit “okay”; and then you get a message on your phone. It looks like I’ve texted the money to you, but that’s not quite what’s happening under the hood. The text message is going to a central server, which moves the money from one pot to another pot within the M-Pesa central account, and then it sends you a text message. But, to the customer, it looks like the money’s gone from one phone to another by text.

Right now, we track about 60 different efforts around the world to develop improved batteries and some of them hold some long-term promise. We rate all of them from one to five, where five is we should be doing business with them and one is complete BS.” Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Tech Insider, 10th

That looked like an intense little conversation,” she said. “Who called?” “President of the United States,” he answered, starting the engine. “Okay, fine,” Cori sighed. “Don’t tell me.

where the user just exits the taxi without having

The key skill sets in this new world will belong to the data scientists who understand when, why, and how customers use bank products, and the storytellers who can place the product or service in the customer’s life when and where they need it. Not those who attempt to pull me into a branch so I can jump through the risk hoops to prove I am worthy of a product.

The new bank account is being defined by a different set of rules. Low friction, engaged customer base, differentiated distribution (no branches), and strong digital (mobile and web) support are all the rage, but at the core is a new approach to the basic day-to-day bank account.

Banking is no longer somewhere you go, it’s something you do.

Now for the other—more controversial—reason why robots need emotions; so they won’t kill us all. This

The way PayPal started was that it was a security and risk company that stumbled onto payments, which were really in need of development as the Internet was starting to grow. It was to find safe ways of facilitating payments between people who were buyers and sellers who couldn’t interact in person or were interacting online. What you had at the time, as the Internet boom started, was all these businesses that were forming and selling online, and they didn’t have any physical assets—they only had digital assets. If you had a small business that had just started a website, looking to sell something on eBay, for example, and you went to the bank and said, “Could you underwrite me, and allow me to accept electronic payments?,” there was simply no way that these financial institutions

The future of the payment is not in the payment itself or the payment mechanism, but in what the payment does for the customer and the merchant contextually. First, we’ve been through a cycle in

The banking industry has always been about relationships. Social media is about relationships. The two go hand-in-hand. —Frank Eliason, Director of Global Social Media, Citi Group

Incumbents are admittedly iterating on the friction, but have to butt up against compliance, legal and risk departments constantly trying to retain as much of the friction as possible. It takes a really strong CEO and executive team to reform that systemic thinking.

A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab Night Angel or Lightbringer by Brent Weeks Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence The Demon Cycle by Peter V. Brett The Expanse by James S.A. Corey Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames The Black Company by Glen Cook Temeraire by Naomi Novik Red Rising by Pierce Brown The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons

A young man went to the king to ask for his help. The king said that he will help the young man, but only under one condition. Two pieces of paper were shown to the man. Under one was the word “YES” and under other was the word “NO.” In front of a large crowd, the young man needed to pick the “YES” paper. The young man knew that the king was sly and that both papers contained the word “NO.” But, the young man still got the king’s help. How was he able to do that?

Perhaps the extreme example of this habit was a lavishly advertised working in 2018, at a Wiccan bookstore in Brooklyn. Participants were encouraged to bring to the event lists of everything they were upset about, so that all those things could be included in the working’s intention! The official purpose of the working was to stop Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. I noted at the time on my online journal that Kavanaugh had nothing to worry about—and of course he didn’t.

Some of the barriers to successful FinTech-bank partnerships.

We live in a hyperconnected world.

It’s my Prom King, Brett. He’s tapping at the window, wanting me to roll it down or to get out of the car — what an image that would be. How will I ever live that down? I can’t even see myself laughing about it twenty years from now. If the neighbors walk past they’ll probably report me to social services, I can hear them on the phone now, “She’s too lazy to even go to the bathroom, she just shits in her car.

ATMs in 2016? (Source: ATMMarketplace.com)