Have you ever wondered how easy it would be if you could pay with your credit card anywhere, at any time?
Hmmm, nice idea, but the problem has always been a lack of terminals. After all, not many garage sales have their own EFTPOS terminal, right?
WRONG! Silicon Valley based start up firm Square have busted this [...]

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Our recent blog on the move towards a Green Bank has been explored further by our colleagues at Mckinsey in a recent article in the Mckinsey Quarterly.
The underlying hypothesis that we put forward was that climate change will be a massive wealth creation event, not a wealth destruction event. This argument is now starting to [...]

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One of the fundamental challenges facing any new energing technology is funding. It is the Rubicon for any startup business.
With any emergent technology, acceptance by investors follows your classic product lifecycle. Early adoptors, mainstream and laggards. The Cleantech industry finds itself in the early adopter (acceptor) stage just when th world needs it to be [...]

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Malcolm Gladwell is one of our favourite authors. His book the Tipping Point became a phenomenon. We recently noted his latest article (Cocksure) in the New Yorker. It is a wonderful description of the dangers of over confidence and how this contributed to the spectacular fall of Bear Stearns. A great read.

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Like Wow, Wipeout!

The classic Australian rock group Hoodoo Guru’s song from the mid 80’s pretty much captures the nature of the current financial crisis. As a result of this mayhem there is now little doubt that we are about to enter a major down turn. How far down, no one really knows. But what [...]

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When you talk to people about innovation, the conversation has a habit of always drifting to ideas, developing ideas and the search for the ‘big idea’. The idea that will make them rich, bust up the competition and rearrange the market as we know it.
Within many of the large corporates ‘innovation’ invariably ends up [...]

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I had an interesting discussion today with a colleague on the plight of the financial services industry. He was of the opinion, and we were talking about retail consumer finance, that the market was mature and as a result, there wasn’t much opportunity for new growth.
“How many more credit cards do people really need?” he [...]

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