All articles by Douglas Blakey

Douglas Blakey

Tokenization reaches the real world: New Celent report alert

GlobalData’s Celent division releases a flash report on Composable Finance and Programmable Money

US Buy Now Pay Later usage surges as new products proliferate: JD Power

While fintech offerings are driving much of US BNPL growth, it is traditional financial institutions that are delivering better user experiences, according to JD Power

78% of UK businesses now using AI – less than a third see financial benefits

The vast majority of UK firms to invest in AI tools have yet to experience any return on their AI investments, according to research from Studio Graphene

AI vs dirty money: Using open‑source intelligence to expose illicit financial flows

Chad Longo analyses what ‘actionable intelligence’ looks like in practice for retail banking fraud and financial crime teams when monitoring mainstream and obscure platforms and why specialist OSINT technology is becoming essential

Building beyond the core ceiling: how open-close architecture enables a 2040-ready core

Miles Wilson sets out the core tech problem limiting what banks can achieve in terms of modernisation, and the ‘open-close’ principle they need to embrace to break free

Celent launches AI-enabled intelligence to help financial institutions make quick technology decisions

GlobalData’s Celent unit brings research, advisory expertise, proprietary data, and AI-driven discovery into a single platform

Hybrid banking and the coordination challenge behind modern financial systems

Dr Gulzar Singh reflects on how banks are managing the growing complexity of hybrid banking environments and the need to better coordinate systems and workflows across modern financial infrastructure

Cash acceptance is the key to ensuring payments resilience 

Ross Borkett explains how weather disruption, connectivity outages and system failures are exposing single points of failure in the digital payments ecosystem, reinforcing why cash still forms part of a resilient, mixed payment infrastructure

2026 is the year the marketing funnel finally dies

Sabri Suby explains why the traditional awareness-to-action model no longer reflects how people actually buy, and what replaces it in a non-linear, AI-influenced world

Retail Banker International announces winners of the Asia Trailblazer Awards 2026 

The 17th edition of the awards recognise Asia-Pacific’s most innovative retail and digital banking institutions across technology, customer experience, product excellence and social impact