Business operations are generally better engineered today than in the 20th century, with more activities automated for quality control, cost savings and efficiency. But some things haven’t changed: human beings are still involved and continue to be sources of variability and uncertainty in high-risk activities, including manufacturing, power generation, logistics and transportation. Three-Mile Island was exacerbated by human error, the failure to correctly interpret signals from their instruments. In 2004, a major liquefied natural gas plant explosion affected 2% of global production when ineffective shutdown processes failed to prevent a boiler explosion and an even larger secondary explosion. The 2019…

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The metric that keeps CMOs awake at night, CFOs grumbling about marketing spend, and CEOs demanding “more growth, faster!” Few metrics in the banking and fintech arena are as hard to reliably quantify as this one. Luckily, a new study from Fintel Connect, 2025 Cost Per Acquisition Benchmarking Guide for Financial Services, provides some much-needed reality checks. Let’s get real about why your acquisition costs might be too high—and how to fix them before your CEO starts asking uncomfortable questions. The Drivers of Customer Acquisition Cost Here’s what the benchmarking…

Imagine a world where financial transactions occur instantly, assets traverse the globe with seamless efficiency, and every investor, regardless of stature, gains unfettered access to markets with confidence in the identity of their counterparty, previously out of reach. This is not a distant fantasy but a rapidly emerging reality, spearheaded by the projection that $30 trillion worth of assets could be tokenized by 2030. Across the banking spectrum, behemoths such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank are paving the way with the tokenization of deposits. They are introducing proprietary stablecoins to fortify settlement processes and alleviate the complexities…

The world of financial services is always evolving, but recently there are signs of a seismic shift. At the heart of this transformation is the rise of cryptocurrencies. Digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a host of others – including stablecoins – have moved from the fringes of the financial system to the forefront, capturing the attention of investors, regulators, and, increasingly, traditional banks. As the cryptocurrency market continues to mature, one question that is becoming increasingly urgent to answer is whether banks in the United States should be permitted to own cryptocurrencies. If banks are to remain relevant in…

After next week’s Federal Reserve Board meeting, Fed head Jerome Powell will hold his customary press conference for reporters who cover this powerful institution. But there are fundamental questions that get to the guts of how the Fed operates and the assumptions it holds about money, which guide its decision-making, that don’t get asked. This episode of What’s Ahead reveals several of the key questions that should be asked. Follow me on Twitter. Send me a secure tip. Read the full article here

Bank executives are sounding the alarm about a weakening economy, and everyone should be taking them seriously. In the last few days, BNP Paribas, Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have all announced either that the probability of a recession is rising or that they are downgrading American stocks from Overweight to Neutral. It is understandable that the stock market is a big focus, because we can easily see how the escalating trade war and layoffs are affecting stock prices on a second-by-second basis. Stock market indices are leading indicators of where investors presently think the economy is…

The world of financial services is always evolving, but recently there are signs of a seismic shift. At the heart of this transformation is the rise of cryptocurrencies. Digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a host of others – including stablecoins – have moved from the fringes of the financial system to the forefront, capturing the attention of investors, regulators, and, increasingly, traditional banks. As the cryptocurrency market continues to mature, one question that is becoming increasingly urgent to answer is whether banks in the United States should be permitted to own cryptocurrencies. If banks are to remain relevant in…

Buried in a footnote of a nearly five-year-old regulatory letter, IL 1170, the national banking regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), opened the door for national banks to participate in the cryptocurrency marketplace. The potential to modernize the financial services system and to provide a safe environment for customers to transact in cryptocurrency was never realized because the banking regulatory agencies under the Biden administration, while never retracting the letter, essentially refused to acknowledge the existence and validity of that official publication, IL 1170. Fast forward to March 7, 2025, and the OCC’s new publication, Interpretive…

The U.S. job market has taken a very worrisome turn for the worst. Data released by global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm, Challenger, Gray, and Christmas Incorporated, shows that in just the first two months of this year, 221,812 Americans have lost their jobs. These job cuts are 33% higher than for the entire 12 months of 2024. February’s layoffs were the highest monthly job cuts level since July 2020, when factories and offices globally were being forced to shut because of the severity of the Covid pandemic. In recent decades, the only February that was worse for…

Digital assets, beginning with cryptocurrency and evolving rapidly to include tokenized forms of money and financial instruments, have been with us for well over a decade now. In the beginning they existed on the fringes of established financial systems, but as the world slowly became more accustomed to them, and as they evolved to include central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins, this changed. Stability and utility allowed for a genuine appreciation of the benefits that the underlying technology enables: efficiency, accessibility, transparency, security, and always on availability. So much progress has been made that we are no longer the…