Basel 3.1: The Regulation Coming Over the Hill
Somewhere in the small Swiss city of Basel, inside a circular tower overlooking the Rhine, a committee of central bankers has been quietly reshaping the rules of global finance for half a century. What they’ve decided is now about to land squarely on the UK lending market, and if you’re advising clients on mortgages, you […]
How conversational AI actually happened, told through the people who made it
When ChatGPT landed in November 2022 and a hundred million people signed up in two months, most of us had never heard of Ilya Sutskever. Eighteen months later, the same name was on the front page of the Financial Times because he had voted to fire Sam Altman at OpenAI. The board reversed itself within […]
Why the FCA just built a fake bank
Three weeks ago, the FCA was being hauled over the coals for handing a chunk of its most sensitive customer data to Palantir. The Guardian reported the regulator had agreed to pay the controversial US firm more than £30,000 a week to train an AI system on case intelligence files, fraud reports, consumer complaints, phone […]
The FCA Has Just Redrawn the Map for Mortgages. Most Brokers Haven’t Noticed Yet.
There is a document sitting on the FCA’s website, published this week, that could reshape how every mortgage in the UK is originated over the next five years. It is called the Open Finance Roadmap. It is not a consultation paper or a vague statement of intent. It is a plan, with timelines, named use […]
The Rise of Glue Work
Every team has one. The person who notices that two departments are building towards completely different outcomes and quietly sorts it out before anyone else even realises there’s a problem. The person who onboards the new joiner properly, not just with a laptop and a login, but with the context they actually need. The person […]
Britain Is Spending on AI. Just Not Well Enough.
Two per cent. That’s how much the average UK business spends on AI as a proportion of revenue, according to a new study from PwC. The global leaders, companies in the top 20 per cent of AI-driven performance, spend five per cent. And they’re getting 15 per cent back. UK firms get 10. You could […]
What Happens When Your Best People Stop Being Your Most Valuable Asset?
There’s an article doing the rounds called “The Intelligence Curse” by Luke Drago. It’s been widely shared, hotly debated, and if you work in any industry where relationships drive revenue, it deserves your attention. Not because it’s necessarily right about everything, but because the question it asks is one that every leader in financial services […]
John Lewis Just Wrote Off £22m on Housing. Here’s Why Mortgage Professionals Should Pay Attention.
John Lewis has quietly written off £22 million on its failed build-to-rent venture. The scheme, launched in 2020 with ambitions to build 10,000 rental homes, was scrapped in February after the economics stopped working. Architectural designs, planning applications, site preparation, all of it written down to zero. For a partnership that reported £13.4 billion in […]
The AI That Covered Its Tracks
The most striking detail from last week’s Anthropic announcement isn’t that their new model, Claude Mythos Preview, found a 27-year-old security vulnerability in a major operating system. It isn’t that the model identified thousands of critical zero-day flaws across every major OS and web browser in a matter of weeks, work that would take the […]
The 15% LTI Cap Is Under Review. Here’s What the Regulators Are Proposing.
For a rule that has shaped UK mortgage lending since 2014, the loan-to-income flow limit has always been a slightly odd creature. Simple on the surface, a cap on how many mortgages at 4.5 times income or above any single lender could write, but quietly distorting in practice. Lenders built management buffers beneath the 15% […]