The entry bar to fintech, and banking in particular, is high. Not only is starting a bank from scratch complex and resource-intensive, but the general culture is different from "pure tech". While being disruptive and willing to "fail fast" are traits we associate with tech companies, the financial sector is defensive by design. Stricter regulations and mandatory supervision from the state are indicators of how critical financial institutions are. That's why it's always interesting to hear when a tech company or a telecom operator becomes a bank.

91% of Swedes use Swish at least once a month. Only 2% use it to pay in stores. Cards? 61%.

If you're having Claude problems, I feel bad for you, son I got 99 problems, but AI ain't one…

All those videos of fighting robots can look frightening, but giving away candies to humans is a smart move.

What is better than cheap absolutely normal coffee?

Only a few things, perhaps.

I like simplicity. I find it beautiful, what others might call "clean". Basic clothes, that simple yet meaningful essence that makes Uniqlo such a good brand. Or the massive, basic format of Lager 157 that you recognise the moment you walk in.

I remember visiting a Normal store some time ago and getting an impression...

Nostalgia and flashbacks over the cities I never went to.

I remember hearing about the KTH graduation ceremony for the first time when I just started working in a moving company. There were two KTH students working with us over the summer. We spoke a lot about education in Sweden.

Later on, I saw pictures from the ceremony on Facebook. Man, that was beautiful. It looked like a signature landmark to me — years of studies culminated in an exceptional evening.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology holds its graduation ceremony at Stockholm City Hall — the same venue that hosts the Nobel Prize each year. Its interior gives the ceremony a formal, almost historic weight.

KTH was founded in 1827. It has been graduating engineers and architects from this city ever since.

I tried tracking my expenses with an Excel sheet for a few months and it worked as long as I was diligent. I even installed Excel on my iPhone. Some days I was able to document each purchase as soon as it was made; on other days multiple small purchases piled up over several days, so eventually I had to spend a lot of time going back and forth between the Excel sheet and my banking app, deciphering transactions. So I went looking for an app that could make this whole job easier. I tried a few from the recommendations and all of them allowed detailed tracking of personal expenses, "buckets," and other cool stuff that felt advanced. Most of these apps had appealing design, looked polished and inviting. However, none of them removed that manual friction point — either...

I was going to build a Telegram bot that would check content of this WordPress page every day and post short excerpts of new posts to my Telgram channel. First I was gonna use a cloud service that would run checks regularly and trigger necessary actions. Then I decided to build a WordPress plugin for this purpose. Plugins in WordPress can have cron jobs so that made perfect sense.

A few hours later the first version of the plugin, built in Cursor, was tested in production. It runs a check every day at some point to look for new posts. When any post(s) found – it posts link(s) to my non artificial intelligence channel, and if there are no new posts – it generates a short poetic message describing the weather in Stockholm in poetic terms.

I have been hearing this advice from multiple practitioners: when learning programming, work on a project, don’t just do courses. Doing courses is good, while you are learning new stuff, but to get hands-on experience you need to build something tangible and something on your own. And of course there are always tons of ideas for what can be built. At the same time I have been (for a long time now) struggling with my (almost abandoned) Telegram channel called non-artificial intelligence. I barely post there and any new post comes like once in a year. So I guess it would be brilliant to build a bridge between this site and my Telegram channel. Not only would this service mirror links to new posts here, it could also generate something new each day with ChatGPT when I do nothing. It...

The first programming language that I heard of was Delphi. One of the neighbours studied computer science and it was the primary language that they used. However, during their first year, they learned Turbo Pascal and this was his recommendation to start with. In some way unknown to me I got fascinated by the lines of code that harmonically composed a program and made computer to perform different things. So, finding an old book on Turbo Pascal at a flea market, I started following it through. I advanced to half of the book, when along the way I lost focus. Building a calculator was cool, but it was still too far away from all the cool things that nurtured my initial interest. I was also afraid of all the difficult types of math that my neighbour was telling me about....

Master’s Thesis on RIX-INST is defended and submitted. It was an exciting process to interview so many experts and professionals from the field of finance in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and even the USA. One gets truly humbled over how many great stories and personalities that this industry has. At the intersection of technology and economics, payment industry is also a critical one — an industry of great importance to any society. Our world today needs reliable and capacious payment systems, ones that would not depend much (or whatsoever) on specific private actors and rely on networks of state actors, whose interest would be to provide efficient and stable payments without profit-driven logics. UPI, PIX, TIPS, RIX-INST. Many more to come. P.S. Speaking of payments, I almost forgot to thank Professors at KTH Royal Institute of Technology for the wisdom, time...

Swish has announced their new product addition — a virtual bank card that can be used from inside their app. An alternative to traditional mobile wallets. Supported by Visa and Mastercard. Works both in Sweden and worldwide. The first version is available for Android smartphones, while iOS will be supported soon.

My personal opinion is that the market of payments, and especially mobile payments, will stay fragmented and glocal. Strong companies with local presence will support global transactions via integrations and partnerships with other similar providers. I also expect existing giants such as Visa and Mastercard to remain mostly undisrupted, even more — they will evolve too, if not stimulate the evolution.

I remember seeing Delphi for the first time and thinking how cool it is to “create UI with buttons and texts”. It was an older neighbour that did Bachelor’s in Computer Science who showed me. It was as well him who recommended me to study Turbo Pascal 7.0 which is “easy to start with”.

So I bought the book on some flea market. And started iterating through. I remember building a simple calculator, being able to perform simple arithmetic operations. That was cool — to see something being built by you, something that you create.

As the Master’s degree program at KTH is coming to its logical end, I will start writing my thesis work in January 2025. The initial idea to investigate retail, POS and payments has now evolved into a more tangible subject – to write about Riksbanken’s payment system RIX-INST.

It reminds me of 2006 and 2007, new Nas album, and “Doctor’s Advocate” from The Game. Kanye West made a verse, hypnotizing music.

I just heard a peculiar story from our new manager regarding the accountability at the workplace: A new CEO has joined the company and took the time to meet with each team member personally to better understand the business. It quickly became clear that things were far from perfect. First, the CEO met with the Operations Manager and asked why some processes weren’t streamlined. The response? “Someone before me didn’t create clear guidelines.” Next, the CEO met with the Finance Manager and inquired about a mistake in the numbers. The CFO replied, “Someone here must have made that mistake.” Finally, the CEO spoke with the Marketing Manager about the decline in brand popularity. The CMO responded, “Someone directed efforts in the wrong direction.” After these meetings, the CEO gathered everyone and made a decisive statement: “I’m firing ‘Someone,’ whoever that...

I remember how fascinated I was when I saw this movie as a kid. The technology was exciting: a whole robot that could learn from its own mistakes and pick up skills from the outside world, continuously improving. It was irrelevant that later this same machine turned into a wired psychopath. After all, how could you blame a robot, especially if it turned out that the robot was built this way?

The invention of new and powerful tools changes the way we work and perform tasks. However, these tools do not necessarily make the tasks obsolete. The invention of the washing machine did not eliminate the need to do laundry, although the way we do it has changed dramatically.