If you search for a history of banking in Wikipedia the first paragraph reads as follows:

The first banks were the merchants of the ancient world that made loans to farmers and traders that carried goods between cities. The first records of such activity dates back to around 2000 BC in Assyria and Babylonia. Later in ancient Greece and during the Roman Empire lenders based in temples would make loans but also added two important innovations: accepted deposits and changing money. During this period there is similar evidence of the independent development of lending of money in ancient China and separately in ancient India.

Banks were clearly one of the earliest professions to emerge and their main purpose was to lend money and meet one of the most long-standing needs in the market. They then moved into accepting deposits and changing money and a new industry was born.

The basic idea was that you received interest on the money that you deposited with banks, plus some additional services, and banks would then have access to large amounts of capital that they could then lend out at higher interest rates thus turning a profit.

Fast forward a few thousand years and the industry became much larger and more complicated as banks tried to drive more and more profit from the money their customers had deposited. Instead of just lending out a percentage of all their deposited cash, banks started borrowing against their deposits and borrowing against their lending to the point that they were lending out far more money than they actually had. This all works well when the market is moving up.

But then we had the economic crisis of 2008 and property and indeed most asset prices came crashing down. This led to the bank’s aggressive strategies becoming unraveled and they have been deleveraging and trying to restore some order to their operations and their balance sheets ever since.

Guest columnist Jos White identifies one of European technology’s sweet spots

This is a guest column in the Telegraph’s Tech Start-Up 100 debate series. The Start-Up 100 is supported by Orrick, Silicon Valley Bank and Microsoft BizSpark.

One of the biggest shifts in the last year or so – and something we’ll undoubtedly see more of in 2011 and beyond – is the rise of mobile internet. If CES is anything to go by, smartphones and tablet devices are going to continue sweeping across the market at a terrific pace: starting with consumers, but soon reaching into business, education and government. This huge growth in the market will be further accelerated in 2011 by smartphone prices coming down significantly, by ever-improving mobile networks and by increasingly ubiquitous and free WiFi networks. Research suggest smartphones sales will exceed half a billion during that year, overtaking PC sales for the first time.

European companies have some big advantages over their American counterparts because of the natural head start they have had. Mobile adoption came much faster and much more rapidly in Europe, spurred on in part by the innovations enabled by GSM networks that weren’t available in the US. As a result, our mobile market has matured faster than America’s has. There’s a whole generation of consumers coming through who expect their first point of contact to be through a mobile device.

Europe is producing some very strong online services – think Groupspaces, Huddle, Spotify, Skype, Tradeshift and LOVEFILM – that have a large and growing user base. The next step for them is to truly unlock the power of their service across mobile platforms. The question these companies need to be asking themselves now is not ‘when can we do this?’, but ‘how quickly can we do this and how can we make it an even better experience than it is on a PC?’ That will be of the key challenges that defines 2011 for almost every web-based business.

The businesses that get ahead will be those that take full advantage of mobile, delivering a quality service that exploits the unique characteristics of the platform, in a way that consumers really love – rather than providing something people can put up with until they get back to a PC.