Joël Van Hoolandt — Fractional CTO | Magma Consulting

If we come back on one of the top 2015 investment sector, the FinTech phenomenon is quite interesting. Business Insider UK published an article (one week before the London-based FinTech event) estimating that Financial Technologies sector was around 49BN USD. That amount was, according to the article, spread like the following:     31,6 BN investments were done in the US;     5,4 BN in the UK;     4,4 BN for Europe (yes, Brexit was already a fact);     3,5 BN for China and 2,2 BN for India. And what the article also mentioned was that 25% of those 49,7BN were invested during the last five years (that's about 12,7 BN USD). But that’s from the supply side. We have a lot of products (peer-to-peer lending platforms; crowd funding; on-line broking etc.), but where are the data on the other side of the pipe? Who is actually using Fin-Tech products (and, no, your on-line banking platform is not part of it)? The VC ecosystem ...

Maybe it's a New Year coincidence, but I see more and more often the question of the sense and the value that pops up. What is that within a consultant's life, the purpose of what we do, as economic entities, is so popular nowadays? Why (in a sudden?) the reason of what we do became so important (not that I ever considered the question as not important, but those topics seem to be more popular today). And, indeed, why and where a consultant can bring value into the society? First, I would argue that value as concept is pretty vague and large; and that even a very small fraction of value should be taken into account (if you want to make the maths). For example, how can we assess the impact of a new corporate governance in a private company? what is the value of my contribution as a board member of a non-profit organization? If you help coordinating the deployment of new technology (conducting change management and adoption of a new product), you increase the level o...

In my previous post about disruption in the banking industry, I explained why banking business was under the heavy pressure of the disruptive technology (low or zero cost operations; software enabled investment decisions; crowd-funding possibilities and no bank business in between). Another important sector where technology will create value is the health care sector. And besides the obvious self-diagnostic tools (fingerprints on a sugar analysis tablet; blood tracking applications etc.) where the patient will be asked to send his results via the Internet, software intelligence will do the rest. And apart diagnostic tools, we have already today some optimization logics and processes where you can improve, let's say, bed occupancy. Or, when you need to squeeze time on the preparation of surgery blocks, there are solutions for aiming at a greater efficiency of those existing, and often expensive, assets. And that's where computers are good at...

  Being interested in the application of new technologies (understand how a traditional business model can be disrupted by new IT products, like taxi industry with Über, postal services impacted by the mail or leisure business (with AirBnB and the hotel industry)), I thought banking industry was worth some readings (a special report of The Economist to name it).     First, let's recap of what the core banking business is: organize the market place between borrowers and savers. Banks live on the interest margin between the two market players; organize the market payments, through offering several payments possibilities (credit cards, debit cards, international transfers etc.). Your local branch is charging you for this service; charging clients for several advices, like for brokerage or investments, for example. All those three activities are, more or less, equally important in a global banking revenue (I don't take here specialized banks...

Commission welcomes agreement to end roaming charges and to guarantee an open Internet   Huge telephone bills ruining your holiday budget, an Internet connection not delivering on its promises: these experiences will be soon old memories. Almost two years after the European Commission put forward its proposal for a telecoms single market, an agreement was found with the European Parliament and the Council. The compromise was reached earlier today following final negotiations between the three institutions (so-called 'trilogue' meetings). It foresees:   The end of roaming charges in June 2017. When travelling in the EU, mobile phone users will pay the same price as at home, with no extra charges. Strong net neutrality rules protecting the right of every European to access Internet content, without discrimination. These measures will be completed by an ambitious overhaul of EU telecoms rules in 2016. This reform will include a more effective EU-level spectru...

Currently reading Thinking, Fast and Slow from Daniel Kahneman , I'm fascinated by the influence of the 'priming' effect (which is, basically, the effect of one idea to another one. Let's pretend you read some words about 'fatigue', 'old age' and 'high temperatures' for example...well, this will conduct you to move and walk slower, for example). What strikes me on the reading is how sensitive we are on contextual (even unconscious) information. Because if you take a serious look at what Kahneman is saying (and his explanation is based on various academic publications), it means that even when you think that you make a coherent, well-thought, rational choice... you're not.   A conclusion that brings me then in my business environment, where we all try (especially as a management consultant) to give best guidance and advices to make the client take the proper and best decision as possible. Decision-making as a process is certainly far fr...

Coming back on the McKinsey report I discussed on my last post, one emerging segment was interesting (well, they all are) - but let's focus on one more specifically, otherwise I don't have anything to say for this month). Being involved in knowledge and IT management for many years now, the section of automation of knowledge work is one of the most challenging. With the emergence of new tools, new programming languages and techniques (what after object-oriented programming?), increased processing power, enhanced connectivity and portability...more than 100 millions FTE's could be impacted). The use of deep learning, neural networks (computers that enable and adapt their own algorithms), we expect huge job shifts (job losses and job creations, with gains in medical sciences, management and professional services [fraud detection, for example]). This is probably underestimated today in the current CIO agenda's, where we're still lacking good and robust informat...