Cristian

“The Halifax-Bank of Scotland merger brought to an end the greatest wave of consolidation in British banking history, wholly reshaping the industry in just a few years. It had begun with NatWest bidding for Legal & General; that caused the Bank of Scotland to make a surprise hostile bid for NatWest which it lost to Royal Bank of Scotland. In the meantime Lloyds bid for Abbey National which then approached Bank of Scotland – which merged with Halifax. It seemed like a great game of musical chairs, with Lloyds, which had earlier lost Midland to HSBC, the one left out.”
― Ivan Fallon, Black Horse Ride: The Inside Story of Lloyds and the Banking Crisis

“Aides who have worked with him for years still question whether he even knew the difference between right and wrong. He never listened, never learned, never changed: he never believed he had done anything wrong.”
― Anthony Seldon, Johnson at 10: The Inside Story

“Skills are taught experientially—meaning that students studying AI don’t have their heads buried in books. In order to learn, they need lexical databases, image libraries, and neural nets. For a time, one of the more popular neural nets at universities was called Word2vec, and it was built by the Google Brain team. It was a two-layer system that processed text, turning words into numbers that AI could understand.17 For example, it learned that “man is to king as woman is to queen.” But the database also decided that “father is to doctor as mother is to nurse” and “man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker.”18 The very system students were exposed to was itself biased. If someone wanted to analyze the farther-reaching implications of sexist code, there weren’t any classes where that learning could take place.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“RBS is investing tens of millions of pounds in Bó, which is positioned firmly in the personal banking space and aims to compete head-on with the likes of Monzo, a three-year-old digital bank which already has over a million customers. Named after the Danish word for ‘to stay’, Bó aims to help customers manage their finances better, for example by alerting them to better deals from utility companies. RBS reportedly intends to shift around 1 million of its roughly 17 million UK retail customers onto the Bó platform after the launch, believing such cannibalisation is preferable to losing customers to rival fintech brands.”
― Ian Fraser, Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain