Financial History

Gouden Bocht - history of Amsterdam - canal - financeThe history of organisations, countries and people always matters. It contains a lot of clues with respect to the fundamental drivers of change in organisations, industries and countries. An understanding of this history is therefore very useful when making policies or plans for future projects and developments.

My inspiration
The relevance of financial history became pretty clear to me when, at some point in time, I needed to delve out the history of the use of the PIN-code in the Netherlands. I locked myself up in a room with a huge carriage of archives and funny enough, that is when the virus hit me.  What particularly struck me at that point in time, was a quote of the 1920s on strategic drivers in banking, which adequately summarised the board room dynamics that I could observe in the mid-1990s.

Trip Advisor - financial history walking tourSince then I started out with a PhD research on the history of Dutch payments, which until today is still pending. My current approach is to disseminate my insights and knowledge to a broad public so that they may become equally fascinated by our financial history. To this end I’ve started out a whole array of activities ranging from a virtual museum, to city tours, blogs, workshops and presentations.

Contact
If you are interested in joining one of these activities or in using your companies history to create a unique event for your employees or customers, feel free to contact me.