Episodes
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Our hosts, David M. Brear, Sam Maule and Simon Taylor are joined by two great guests: Ahmed Zaidi CTO at Catalyst AI and Kathryn Harris Innovation Lead at Lloyds Banking Group, to talk about all the latest news in fintech. Including:
Starling closes their community. Citing several factors for the move, such as lack of use by most customers, the forum being a distraction for the company from core focus and a vocal minority misunderstanding its purpose. Starling’s post also made reference to banking being a highly regulated environment and forum interaction being restricted by that due to ‘tipping off’ rules. Starling says they remain committed to open conversation with customers and the wider fintech community through other channels such as social media, blog and monthly newsletter. We have a couple of great interviews with Sophie Guibaud, Managing Director for Europe at Fidor and Richard Cook, Online Community Manager from Monzo to get an insight into what communities have provided there.
Digitised sexism. It turns out that women entrepreneurs who seek to finance their ventures using bank financing are increasingly forced to find solutions elsewhere. And compared to men, women entrepreneurs are pushed into desperate and extreme types of financing.
State of concern. New York state’s top banking regulator on Friday sued the federal government to void its decision to award national bank charters to online lenders and payment companies. Maria Vullo, superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services, called the decision by the OCC to let financial technology companies, or fintech firms, obtain charters “lawless, ill-conceived, and destabilizing of financial markets.”
The fintech hub to watch. Alipay and China UMS to set up EU hub in Luxembourg. At the end of a week-long mission led by Minister of Finance Pierre Gramegna to Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai, China’s Ant Financial confirmed the decision of its payment arm – Alipay - to set up its EU hub in Luxembourg. The announcement comes after China UMS, another major Chinese Fintech company, also announced its choice of Luxembourg. During the visit, several cooperation agreements have been signed.
Arizona hits London on a mission to woo UK fintechs. Doug Ducey, the Governor of Arizona, hopes Britain’s best Fintechs can be persuaded to look beyond Silicon Valley when expanding into the US for the first time. Arizona is pitching to British fintechs in the UK this week, offering regulation-free access to the US market and promises of help with office space and talent.
South African fintech JUMO to expand in Asia with Goldman Sachs backing. South Africa-based financial technology firm JUMO plans to expand in high-growth Asian markets after securing the backing of Goldman Sachs. Since 2014, JUMO, which provides credit and savings products to customers and SMBs through mobile, has mainly focused on Africa where the adoption of mobile money has transformed the banking landscape. We have a great interview with 11:FS' own Lesley-Ann Vaughan to get some deeper insight.
Abu Dhabi opens digital sandbox. Abu Dhabi Global Markets (ADGM), the emirate's international financial centre, has further underlined its fintech ambitions with the launch of a digital sandbox. The sandbox is designed to offer banks, fintechs and regulators an open digital marketplace in which to collaborate on the creation, testing and adoption of new products.
Mary Meeker, the legendary internet analyst is leaving Kleiner. Meeker’s by far the most senior woman in VC.
The departure is rooted in different visions for the types of deals they would like to do. But like so many disputes in recent years at Kleiner Perkins, according to those familiar with the situation, there was also persistent friction between the two sides in ways that had little to do with the firm’s core business — over mundane things such as whether to host a holiday party in San Francisco or closer to Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley.
And finally, the 'first' pub in the UK has gone cashless...and it's near Ipswich.
All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.
Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com
This week's episode was written and produced by Dhanum Nursigadoo, produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill. Special Guests: Ahmed Zaidi, Kathryn Harris, and Sophie Guibaud. -
Shamir Karkal is Co-Founder of Simple Bank, he was the CFO during his time there and is now the CEO and Co-Founder of Sila.
Sarah and Shamir talk about the genesis of Simple Bank and how it developed into a unique banking proposition that delivers a minimum loveable product.
They also talk about the journey that Simple had to navigate in order to achieve its success and how frustration with an issue no-one else was paying attention to led to a successful business.
We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.
If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!
This episode was produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guest: Shamir Karkal. -
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Our hosts, Sarah Kocianski and David M. Brear sit down with three great guests: Dr. Louise Beaumont, Independent, working with players across the industry to ensure disruption, Daniel Hegarty, CEO of Habito, and Adam Dodds, CEO of Freetrade to talk all about the latest news in fintech. Including: British airways breach and banks’ reactions. The airline said personal and financial details of customers making or changing bookings on two specific dates had been compromised. About 380,000 transactions were affected, but the stolen data did not include travel or passport details. BA said all customers affected by the breach had been contacted on Thursday night. The breach only affects people who bought tickets during the timeframe provided by BA, and not on other occasions.Wells Fargo get investigated by US Dept of Justice. The Justice Department is investigating possible fraud committed at the company’s wholesale banking unit. Quoting unnamed “people familiar with the matter,” the probe follows “revelations that employees improperly altered customer information” – including adding information such as Social Security numbers to documents without those people’s consent.UK fintech valuations flying high. Fintech and finance seemingly unaffected by Brexit as funding and valuations continue to rise, according to the FC. Funding Circle, the peer-to-peer lender, unveiled plans to raise £300m in an initial public offering in October that is expected to value it at more than £1.5bn. British bank OakNorth valued at £1.8 billion in £76m funding round.TransferWise reports a profit for the second year in a row as revenue doubles. Fintech start-up TransferWise reports second year of profit, and with an annual post-tax net profit of £6.2 million for the fiscal year ending March 2018. The firm says that £3 billion worth of transactions is moved around each month by its more than 4 million users. It plans to roll out its traveler-friendly borderless account product to U.S. users later this year.UK's Tech Nation picks 20 fintech programme members. Tech Nation has picked 20 early-stage startups to join its new fintech programme, promising to give them intensive backing to help grow their businesses and the country's financial technology ecosystem. The new programme will see participants get the chance to work with and learn from some of the UK's top fintech entrepreneurs. The 20 firms picked to join the first cohort work in areas such as payments, financial inclusion, regtech, AI, SME financing, Open Banking, and cryptocurrencies.Habito’s life insurance. Underwritten by AIG life, the service aims to offer cover in as few as nine questions, and without the need for any medical data, by using information already given to the provider during the mortgage application process. Daniel Hegarty is on hand to give us more info. The biggest winners in the South-east Asian e-payment market. e-payment players such as ride sharing apps Grab and Go-Jek will be the biggest winners in the South-east Asian e-payment market, going by a latest Morgan Stanley report. Banks will lose between US$13.1 billion and US$15.5 billion in value to non-bank operators by 2022, Telcos will also benefit, taking around US$2 billion to US$2.9 billion according to the report.Fintech changing Africa’s GDP. The contribution of fintech to Sub Saharan Africa’s economic output will increase by at least $40 billion to $150 billion by 2022, according to Financial Sector Deepening Africa, which is a development-finance organisation funded by the UK. Sub Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product is about $1.6 trillion, according to IMF. Most of that money is coming out of mobile-phone companies.Agatha Answers, an AI search & answer engine. Forethought’s Agatha Answers which is an AI engine designed to help customer service staff more efficiently and accurately answer customer questions. It’s an AI search & answer engine that indexes knowledge within an organization and pro-actively delivers it to employees in context. It provides answers but leaves the human agent to go with what answer they think best fits the question and situation. And finally, we take a look at what happened when John McAfee told his Twitter followers to harass the SEC. All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com For any startups that are looking for Seed and Series A funding and think Nationwide would be a good strategic investor, you can get in touch with them via @NBSVentures on Twitter or email hello@nbsventures.co.ukThis week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins. Edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Adam Dodds, Daniel Hegarty, and Dr. Louise Beaumont.
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Today's insights show takes a closer look at what's going on in the Islamic finance space. We take a look at what Islamic Fintech actually is, its global scale, what makes it different from other areas of fintech, how it fits in with the push towards ethical fintech, and much more.
We speak to the best experts to answer all these questions:
Abdul Haseeb Basit - Co-founder and Principal, Elipses
Harris Irfan - Partner at Gateway and Chair of the UK Islamic FinTech Panel
Stella Cox - Managing Director, DDCAP Group and Chair of TheCityUK Islamic Finance Markets Advisory Group’
Irfan Khan - Founder and CEO of Yielders
This episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Abdul Haseeb Basit, Harris Irfan, Irfan Khan, and Stella Cox. -
Our hosts, Sarah Kocianski and Ross Gallagher sit down with two great guests: Lois Ollerenshaw, Ventures Principal at NBS Ventures and Valentina Kristensen Director of Growth and Communications at Oaknorth to talk all about the latest news in fintech. Including:
Standard Chartered’s new CEO and virtual banking licence, David has a great interview with Samir Subberwal, Head of Retail Banking at Standard Chartered to get the inside scoop on the story. Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong has set up an entity for its virtual bank and submitted its application for a virtual banking licence to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
HSBC’s new digital bank. HSBC’s close to launching a new standalone digital bank known as ‘Project Iceberg’ which is
expected to focus on small business customers - possible beta launch this year. A banking industry source said: “All the big banks are recruiting hundreds of people to build ‘attacker’ brands within their own organisations.”
TSB’s boss to step down after yet another outage. TSBs string of IT failures has ended with TSB chief Paul Pester stepping down after 7 years in charge. Chairman Richard Meddings will take on the role of executive chairman until a new chief executive is appointed.
We asked the good people of Aldgate if they had heard of the TSB issues, or any bank outages and if so would that stop them banking with them?
Post Brexit boost to African markets. As the UK leaves the European Union, the City of London will play an even greater role in financing the fastest-growing economies across Africa - according to PM Theresa May. UK-Nigeria trade was worth £4.2 billion last year - many UK companies e.g. British Airways, Unilever, GSK, Shell, SCB have successful operations in Nigeria.
We have a fantastic interview with Anna Wallace from the FCA, who was with the PM in Africa last week and gave us the inside story on the FCA's plans for fintech in Africa.
Yolt partnerships with Homelyfe and PensionBee. Pensionbee customers can now see their live pension balance within Yolt. Clare Reilly, Head of Corporate Development, PensionBee said: “The Yolt-PensionBee integration is a game-changer for UK pension savers, who have sadly been left languishing in the 20th century for far too long.”
We have another great interview, this time with Lucy Woolfenden, Marketing Director at Yolt to tell us more about it.
Australia's Big Four roll out real-time payments with Osko. Australia's New Payments Platform is expecting a surge in transactions as the country's Big Four banks roll out Osko, an overlay service which enables account-to-account real-time payments via e-mail and mobile phone numbers. With the Big Four now ready to go live, Osko will be available within the online banking channel of more than 60 financial institutions, reaching over 42 million consumer and business accounts.
And finally, 'Bingeable,' 'biohacking' and 'fintech' are now officially words.
All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.
Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com
For any startups that are looking for Seed and Series A funding and think Nationwide would be a good strategic investor, you can get in touch with them via @NBSVentures on Twitter or email hello@nbsventures.co.uk
This week's episode was written by Laura Watkins and Dhanum Nursigadoo, produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Anna Wallace, Lois Ollerenshaw, Lucy Woolfenden, Samir Subberwal, and Valentina Kristensen. -
Today's insights show takes a closer look at what's going on in the fintech space in Luxembourg. How can a fintech hub be such a big deal if no one’s ever heard of it? Where is Luxembourg anyway, isn’t it that tiny country sandwiched between France, Belgium and Germany?
We speak to the best experts to answer all these questions:
Pierre Gramegna - Luxembourg Finance Minister
Nicolas Mackel, CEO, Luxembourg for Finance
Nasir Zubairi - CEO of LHoFT
Denise Voss - Chairman of ALFI, the Association of the Luxembourg Fund Industry.
Mike Kane, CEO of Hydrogen
Andy Bryant, COO of Bitflyer Europe
Elena Poughia, MD of Dataconomy
We take a deep dive on the fintech sector at Luxembourg, what the country's doing to create a thriving environment for fintechs, and how the country is building a fintech hub set to rival London, Berlin, and every other European fintech hub.
This episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Andy Bryant, Denise Voss, Elena Poughia, Mike Kane, Nasir Zubairi, Nicolas Mackel, and Pierre Gramegna. -
Our hosts, Sarah Kocianski and Simon Taylor sit down with two great guests: Alexa Fernandez, Open Innovation and Ecosystem Builder at BBVA, and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, Managing Director at Funding Options to talk about the all the latest news in fintech. Including:
Starling’s secret project, Royal Bank of Scotland has enlisted the online-only challenger Starling to assist in its secret project to build a standalone digital bank. Starling has signed “a contract to provide payment services to support new initiatives at RBS/NatWest”. The digital bank reported that its number of personal current accounts has risen to 210K from 43K last November with a average deposit of £900.
Are challengers the future of banking - will enough people switch? The new wave of digital-only challengers is threatening to change the high street bank’s position as a fixture of the British financial experience. Monzo expects to have opened 1.5 million current accounts by the end of the year. Currently on 925,465, Starling on 210,000.
Goldman Sachs’ Marcus come to the UK. Goldman Sachs has started rolling out its retail bank, Marcus, in the UK, starting with a savings account offered to its 6,000 staff in Britain. Marcus - named after the bank's founder Marcus Goldman - has already amassed more than $20bn in deposits and lent $3bn to customers in the US. In an internal memo, Goldman's Europe boss Richard Gnodde said a nationwide roll-out would follow "in the coming weeks".
Warren Buffet invests in Paytm. Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, made moves to buy a 4% stake of Paytm’s parent company, One97 Communications. The talks have been ongoing since February. As part of the deal Berkshire Hathaway will pay between $300-350M to Paytm which would give it a valuation of over $10BN.
Google Tez becomes Google Pay. Last September, Google launched Tez, an app for instant money transfers in India. Now the company announced it’s rebranding the app to Google Pay. It’s global payments services with what it’s built for India.
Loan consolidation app Tally raises money to launch robo-advisor. Tally, a 3 year old service that aims to help users better manage their credit card debt, is launching a robo advisor. Tally, which requires users to have a minimum score of 660 analyzes their financial profile to determine the fastest and smartest way to pay down debt. It then offers users a new line of credit at a lower interest rate: between 7.9% to 19.9% per year depending on a user’s credit history.
a16z helps raise $102m to build an Amazon Web Services killer. DFINITY, a startup based out of Zug, Switzerland and Palo Alto has a very lofty goal to build what it calls the “Internet Computer”: a blockchain-based, decentralised and non-proprietary network to run the next generation of mega-applications. DFINITY aims to launch an initial version of its public network — which it has also dubbed “Cloud 3.0” — towards the end of the year.
Wonga on verge of collapse. Wonga the payday lender which was once one of Britain's fastest-growing consumer finance companies, is on the brink of collapse this weekend following a deluge of customer compensation claims. 5 years ago Wonga were aiming to pursue a New York stock market listing that could have valued it more than $1bn and turned it into a British technology 'unicorn'. Wonga's decision go into administration comes three weeks after the company had received an emergency £10m cash injection to keep it afloat.
Are cheques checking out? Debate over the future of cheques has been reignited amid a pay dispute at a company that has been printing cheques for more than 100 years. The use of cheques in the UK peaked in 1990, when there were more than four billion transactions a year. A total of 405 million cheques were processed in the UK last year.
And finally, we kid you not, this story is the GOAT. Goat facial recognition is coming soon… or maybe not
We thought this was a facial recognition story, which it is, but not quite in the way we thought.
All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.
Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com
This week's episode was written by Laura Watkins and Dhanum Nursigadoo, produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill. Special Guests: Alexa Fernandez, Doug Bobenhouse, and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard. -
John Hope Bryant is CEO and Chairman of Operation Hope, Promise Homes, CEO of Bryant Group Ventures, and Co-Founder of Global Dignity. He was also the first person Sam Maule ever interviewed for 11:FS. The two of them sit down. a year later, to discuss financial inclusion and how it makes everyone wealthier.
Promise Homes is a profitable enterprise combining all of John Hope Bryant's passions and interests, aimed at encouraging underserved people to become owners of their own property by renting to them with a goal to becoming part owners and eventually whole owners. It also creates a healthy renter-landlord relationship that benefits everyone in the transaction.
A 200 point difference in credit score is all it takes to massively change someone's life, as John Hope Bryant says: there's never been a riot in a 700 credit score neighbourhood. Whereas in a 500 credit score community is where the real problems are found.
Raising the value of communities is central to John Hope Bryant's message, it stabilises the area and reduces conflicts. He shares how he's helped uplift people's lives by creating financial structures that increase wealth for everyone involved. When poor people do better it increases the wealth of wealthy people.
John Hope Bryant shares what he's doing to increase the wealth of people in communities that works to improve standards for everyone and how important confidence is in building that wealth.
We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.
If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!
This episode was produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill. Special Guest: John Hope Bryant. -
In this episode the team sit down with top fintech CEOs to tackle the week's top financial news
Kicking off with the news that in the ten year anniversary of the financial crisis, Brits still don't trust their banks to act in the interests of society. We explore what this means, whether banks have ever acted in the interests of society and if this really is the case? We asked some people on the streets around our offices to see if they agree. Find out what they said.
Big banks have had it tough in this week's headlines - TSB have had another outage in the exact week the FCA have mandated banks to declare their outages, and the Telegraph reveals the slightly underhand dealings with savers' rates, in the days and weeks before the Bank of England's interest rate rise. We spoke to Dominic Lindley Director of Policy, New City Agenda (and a member of the Financial Services Consumer Panel) to get his take on this, and to summarise all the big bank bad news stories we’ve just covered.
Amazon have announced their desire to become a price comparison site, sending their competitors' share prices tumbling, we also got some great insight from Oliver Ralph, Insurance Correspondent at the FT on this one.
The team also examine: Revolut's customers getting locked out of their accounts in an attempt to crack down on money laundering; JP Morgan's new investment app which is aimed at millennials and first time investors and offers free trades and the big fintech valuations of the week, which predict Monzo will become the next fintech unicorn in Europe.
All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast @FintechInsiders and join the discussion.
This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Michael Bailey.
Special Guests: Anil Stocker, Caroline Plumb, Dominic Lindley, Oliver Ralph, and Tom Eyre. -
Today's insights show takes a closer look at what it means to have a digital identity and who really controls who you are online?
We speak to the perfect experts to find out:
Jamie Smith - Strategic Engagement Director - Evernym
Emma Lindley - Senior Director of Digital ID and Money at Visa
Vinny Lingham - Co-founder and CEO of Civic
Diane Joyce - CTO for the Post Office Identity Services
Katryna Dow - Founder and CEO of Meeco
Our hosts dive deep into the issue, finding out what your digital identity actually means, who owns it, who the biggest players in the space are and how you can reclaim it with self-sovereign ID. Laura and Ryan also take a look at how digital identity works globally and how it's set to develop in the future.
This episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins, and co-produced by Petrit Berisha, edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Diane Joyce, Emma Lindley, Jamie Smith, Katryna Dow, Ryan Garner, and Vinny Lingham. -
Our hosts, Sarah Kocianski, Simon Taylor, and David M. Brear are sat down with three great guests: Lesley-Ann Vaughan, Director at MiLA Consulting, Andrew Nelson, Vice-President, Banking & Financial Markets at CGI, and Emily Nicolle, Technology Reporter at City AM to talk about the all the latest news in fintech. Including:UK Financial Conduct Authority creates Global Alliance for Fintech Innovation Collaboration. The FCA’s new alliance, the Global Financial Innovation Network (GFIN), is a collaboration between 11 financial authorities and related organization.It will have three functions: A network of regulators collaborating and sharing experience of innovation including emerging technologies (eg AI and DLT) and business models; provide a forum for joint policy work and discussions; and provide firms with an environment in which to trial cross-border solutions - we also have great insight into the story from Anna Wallace, Innovate Head of Department at the FCA.US fintechs are nervous about the fintech federal charter. Fintechs in the US are “cautious” about the specialist fintech charter announced last month. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said it would accept applications for special purpose banking licenses for some types of fintech that do business outside the traditional banking system. They then could operate nationwide under one license rather than a patchwork of state-specific regulations.Standard Chartered Bank sees Hong Kong’s virtual bank licence as ticket to new business worldwide. Standard Chartered which was the first traditional bank in the city to apply for the license, hopes it will open up new areas of growth both in the city and overseas. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) is poised to issue the first virtual licences by the end of the year as part of a bid to promote fintech and tap into the growing trend for online finance.Beijing to ban new online lending platforms. Chinese authorities laid out 10 measures to increase restrictions on the online peer-to-peer lending sector, state-run news agency Xinhua reports. Planned steps include banning new online lending platforms and increasing legal punishment on operators of fraudulent schemes, the report says.Neo-bank Xinja to implement SAP core to take on Australia's Big Four. Australian mobile banking startup Xinja has selected the SAP Cloud for Banking platform to try and take on AUS’ Big Four. The contract with SAP will give the challenger a technology backbone which it says will enable rapid customer onboarding and real time risk and financial assessment. Square's stock jumps to all-time high after Cash app downloads surpass PayPal's Venmo. Cumulative downloads of Square's Cash app are now greater than those of Paypal's Venmo for the first time after a monster July, 33.5 million downloads vs 32.9 million. In June 2018, Cash app customers spent $250 million with Cash Card, nearly tripling since December 2017 and representing $3 billion on an annualized basis.And finally, Playboy is reportedly suing a cryptocurrency platform. Playboy's parent company Playboy Enterprises is suing a Canadian based cryptocurrency company called Global Blockchain Technologies (BLOC) alleging fraud and breach of contract. Playboy Enterprises is alleging that BLOC failed to live up to its end of the contract as in the three months since the deal was made, BLOC has yet to integrate its tech into Playboy's platform, and that it also hasn't paid the $4 million it promised to Playboy as a part of the deal.All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill and Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Andrew Nelson, Anna Wallace, Emily Nicolle, and Lesley-Ann Vaughan.
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Tom Peters is co-author of In Search of Excellence, a book that's often touted as the best business book there is. Nearly 30 years later and with 16 more books under his belt, Tom Peters is still leading the management guru industry he created. Sam Maule talks to him about everything that influenced his life and led up to the moment Peters wrote In Search of Excellence.
Emphasising the need for innovation, transparency, honesty, empowerment, openness (all the traits 11:FS stands for) Tom Peters isn't afraid to call out bullshit where he sees it. Although, Tom is just as capable of going off-topic as Sam. This is a chat between two guys who love their jobs, love their careers, and reflect on both well enough to know how they got where they are today.
There's a lot of expertise required to know hot to make things better. Tom Peters has led a career that's let him write in great detail what it means to derive the best results from a project. That stems from understanding the things that prevent everyone from delivering. And if you pay him well enough, he'll even tell you politely.
Tom Peters makes a living from telling CEO they are doing everything wrong and they love him for it. He'll spend the first five minutes of every speech messing with his audience purely to make a connection with them in the moment it really matters most.
We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.
If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!
This episode was produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guest: Tom Peters. -
Our hosts Ross Gallagher and Sarah Kocianski sat down with: Valentina Kristensen, Head of PR and Marketing at OakNorth Bank, Ryan Garner, 11:FS Jobs to be Done guru, and thought-leader, advisor, consultant and blogger, Sharon O’Dea to talk about the all the latest news in fintech. Including:
Barclays buys “significant” stake in MarketInvoice. Barclays has acquired a significant minority stake in Marketinvoice, in a deal that will also see them lead MarkitInvoice’s upcoming series B fundraising. As Europe’s largest online invoice financing platform, Marketinvoice has received over £18m in publicly-disclosed funding to date. It is also backed by early Spotify investor Northzone and private equity group MCI Capital. By investing, Barclays will will MI’s technology to provide £1bn in capital for the UK’s small businesses.
Wells Fargo customers turfed out of their homes, hundreds of Wells Fargo customers forced out of their homes due to computer glitch. The bank revealed that a coding error hit struggling customers over a five-year period between April 13, 2010, and October 20, 2015. Wells Fargo incorrectly denied them mortgage modifications. 400 customers subsequently lost their homes as the bank foreclosed on the loans. The bank says it has set aside $8 million to compensate customers forced out of their homes.
AU Banking industry is an oligopoly. Damning report finds banking industry an “oligopoly” that exploits its customers. AUS top 4 banks dominate market completely. Australia’s banking system has become so concentrated its major banks can pass on costs and set prices to boost profits without fear of losing market share, through every stage of the economic cycle, the Productivity Commission has found.
Australian regulator to embed supervisors in banks. Australia’s corporate regulator has been given power to “embed” supervisory officers within the country’s biggest banks in an attempt to improve corporate behaviour following a series of damaging scandals.
Facebook shares data with banks. Facebook has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about customers as it seeks to boost user engagement, but Facebook later denied it. WSJ claimed that Facebook wanted U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances.
Challenger bank Monzo launches accounts for 16-18 year olds. Opening up digital current account offering to 16-18 year olds, opening up the bank to more than 1.5 million new young people.
And finally, Ripple hire Bill Clinton as a keynote speaker at their conference. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will headline Ripple's Swell conference later this year, the cryptocurrency payments startup announced Tuesday. The 42nd President of the United States will both give a keynote address and participate in a question-and-answer session.
All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.
Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com
This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill and Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Anil Stocker, Harry Ashbridge, Ryan Garner, Sharon O'Dea, and Valentina Kristensen. -
Today's insights show takes a closer look at what defines a challenger bank, how the name's stuck, and what it actually means. Is it all because of a grudge or is it seeking to disrupt the banking status quo?
We speak to the perfect experts to find out:
Anne Boden - CEO and Co-Founder of Starling
Anthony Thomson - Founder of Atom Bank, Metro Bank, and a new Australian bank (84600)
Tom Blomfield - CEO and Co-Founder of Monzo
Oscar Williams-Grut - Senior Reporter at Business Insider
Our intrepid hosts travel around the issue, finding out what the founders of challenger banks think of the classification, what differentiates them from incumbents (after all many features are available from both types of bank), how challengers create competition amongst themselves and how with the banking landscape changing as rapidly as it is, what the future holds for all financial insitutions, both neophyte and incumbent.
We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.
If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!
This episode was written by Laura Watkins. Produced by Laura Watkins. Edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Anne Boden, Anthony Thomson, Oscar Williams-Grut, and Tom Blomfield. -
Ross, David, and Sarah sit down with Diana Paredes, CEO of Suade Labs and Dr Sian Lewin, AKA the RegDoctor, Client Delivery Director at RegTech Associates. The group discuss the latest news hitting the fintech space this week including:
US charter for fintech, the U.S. Treasury on Tuesday backed the creation of a federal charter for financial technology firms, in a boon for online and peer-to-peer lenders that have long complained the current state-by-state licensing regime is expensive and outdated.
Apple steps up its fintech game, Apple Pay transactions tripled from a year earlier, to more than 1 billion. Cook said that was more than Square and exceeded mobile transactions via PayPal.
Zelle crosses 100 million transaction mark, US based P2P payments network owned and operated by US banks incl Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Users can send money to each other online or via a mobile app, from their existing affiliated bank accounts.
Steady launches to serve the US economy, Steady is the income-building platform for the Build-Your-Own (BYO) workforce, helping people create financial stability and take charge of their future. They have launched their app that will help US gig economy workers source new opportunities for work/income and to empower them to manage their income better.
Chinese regulators are scared of Ant, Ant Financial is now the world’s biggest fintech firm. It handled more payments last year than Mastercard - $8.8trillion vs $5.2trillion, controls the world’s largest money-market fund and tens of millions of people have received loans.
No action for RBS GRG scandal, The City watchdog has confirmed that it has no power to take action against the bank’s disgraced Global Restructuring Group over its treatment of small firms. GRG, which operated between 2005 and 2013, has been accused of pushing firms into bankruptcy in order to maintain its own profits. The FCA has said its powers for discipline do not apply in this case.
UK fintech tops global lists for investment in 2018, the UK has attracted more investment in fintech than any other country worldwide for the first half of the year, raking in $16.1bn (£12.3bn). China came in second place with $15.1bn, followed by the US with $14.2bn. Four of Europe’s top 10 fintech deals happened in the UK ($250m raise by Revolut, $100m by eToro, $60m by Flender and $54m by MoneyFarm), cementing the UK as a funding hotspot.
Brits in the dark on Open Banking, a Yougov survey revealed over 75% of Brits don’t know what it is. Of 2074 adults quizzed by YouGov, just 28% are aware of Open Banking. Even when YouGov gave survey participants a clear description of Open Banking, 45% could not understand the ways they could use it, against 18% who could.
Brits can't talk about money, 22% of people are comfortable discussing their finances, found a Starling survey
61, 67, 46 and 29 per cent who are comfortable discusses their weight, political beliefs, mental health and sex lives respectively. Unsurprisingly, the survey also found a strong correlation between people talking about their money and understanding their own financial habits.
And finally, McAfee will pay you $100k if you get into his ‘unhackable’ crypto-wallet. He’ll give $100,000 to anyone who can break into the ‘Bitfi’ wallet, the supposedly ‘unhackable’ cryptocurrency storage device he has been parroting about on social media of late.
All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.
Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com
This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill and Michael Bailey. Special Guests: Diana Paredes and Sian Lewin. -
Today's insights show takes a closer look at how to solve the major issues of opening a bank account, payments, and getting a loan that are challenging SMBs at the moment.We speak to experts to find out who's going to win the race for SMB loyalty:Edward Berks, Director of Banking, Fintech & Ecosystem, XeroNadya Hijazi - Global Head of Business Banking Digital, HSBC George Bevis, CEO, TideMegan Caywood, Chief Platform Officer at StarlingPaul Bulpitt, Head of Accounting at Xero and Founder of the Wow Company Last time we looked at SMB banking we heard from independent business owners about their individual experiences with SMB banking. Now we want to know if they're typical and if anything they said was surprising to the experts?We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!This episode was written by Laura Watkins. Produced by Laura Watkins & Petrit Berisha. Edited by Michael Bailey & Holly Blaxill. Hosted by Sarah Kocianski. Special Guests: Edward Berks, George Bevis, Megan Caywood, Nadya Hijazi, Oren Greenberg, Paul Bulpitt, and Sam Booth.
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In London, David M. Brear, Simon Taylor, and Sarah Kocianski were our hosts, joined by: Marieke Flament, European Managing Director and CMO of Circle, Simon Vans-Colina, Engineer at Monzo, and Daniel Hegarty, CEO of Habito.
Over in Atlanta, Sam Maule and Doug Bobenhouse are joined by three pairs of guests: Rob Frohwein, CEO of Kabbage and Shannon Johnson, Group President of Financial Institutions at Cardlytics; next up was Kathryn Petralia, COO and Co-Founder of Kabbage, and Andrew Morris, Chief Content Officer at Money20/20; rounding out the show we had Howard Bush, Principal on Industry Experiences and Banking and Capital Markets Lead at Microsoft and Ginger Schmeltzer, Owner and Principal at GDS Advisors, LLC.
Coming on to incredible music and an epic trailer we kick things off with insight into challenger banks. The UK’s digital banks may be profitable sooner than you think Monzo, Starling and Tandem all expect to have hit profitability by 2020 or sooner. The panel examines if Monzo can hit profitability so soon given losses quadrupling recently, Starling's profitability from new revenue streams like business bank accounts and marketplace partnerships, and Tandem acquiring 250K customers since the start of 2018. Next up Starling Bank ditching the purple for a new set of cards, cards for the bank's consumer accounts will be teal, while its business accounts will be turning navy blue. And all cards are portait. Just by like we have Megan Caywood of Starling fame in the audience to show it off.
We move on to Snapchat shutting down Snapcash and giving the space over to Venmo. Snapchat will abandon the peer-to-peer payment space on August 30th. The service was powered by Square Cash. Snapcash gave Snapchat a way to get users to connect payment methods to the app, which were vital to the company’s aim to become a commerce platforms where you can shop without leaving the app. Launched in 2014, ahead of Venmo and Zelle but has ultimately lost customers to both companies. And finally the London team takes a look at what happened to celeb-endorsed cryptocurrencies.
Heading over to Atlanta Doug and Sam kick things off with Rob Frohwein and Shannon Johnson on Uber and Venmo partnering to deliver a new payment experience. The four discuss Uber and Venmo are partnering to deliver a seamless new payment experience available with Uber and Uber Eats. More than 6M payments on Venmo mentioned “Uber” in their description over the past year, how big a deal the partnership is, how important it is that Venmo is offering bank-like solutions without being a bank, and Venmo's security.
Next up, Kathry Petralia and Andrew Morries walk on stage to a great deal of applause, to discuss Facebook Google and others uniting to let customers transfer data between apps. They take a look at whether this is a bonus for start ups, what it means for privacy and data security and why Apple is conspicuously absent from this initiative. Howard Bush and Ginger Schemltzer are on stage next to discuss VISA MoneyGram and Visa Team preparing to deliver real-time global P2P, whether it's a digital and mobile payment option targeting milennials, if cash is still king, why the plan is starting with Mexico and the Philippines and where they'll go next.
And finally the panel takes a look at a woman driving through the streets of South Korea and leaving $14,000 worth of cash in her wake.
All this and so much more on today's very special After Dark episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.
Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com. Find us on Twitter using #AfterDarkVI to get the latest on what’s happened and what people thought.
This episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and Petrit Berisha. Edited by Michael Bailey and Holly Blaxill. Special Guests: Andrew Morris, Daniel Hegarty, Ginger Schmeltzer, Howard Bush, Kathryn Petralia, Marieke Flament, Rob Frohwein, Shannon Johnson, and Simon Vans-Colina. -
AI is a massive subject that's been so spun out by marketing, consultancies, and project proposals as a cure all that it's become difficult to understand what it actually is. To start things off we define what AI really is so you know your AI fact from fiction, then we move on to how AI has developed from simple 'if and then' statements into the powerful applications of Machine Learning. We interview Charlie Wood, Principal Consultant at Capco to get an inside look at what's going on in the AI space. He helps break down the myth behind AI and how it's being used today. We also speak to Scott Seely, Principal Solutions Architect at Microsoft to break down how Computer Vision relates to AI and how advanced image recognition capabilities are becoming as well as where chatbots are becoming reliable with language recognition. We also take a look at where AI is being applied in complex use cases and how skeptical experts are about AIs ability to make you money. Then we take a look at what's going on with AI in financial firms, why AI experts don't want to move into financial services and what needs to be done to make AI a useful product for banks in the future. This episode was written by Petrit Berisha & Sarah Kocianski. Produced by Petrit Berisha & Laura Watkins. Edited by Holly Blaxill & Michael Bailey. Hosted by Sarah Kocianski.Debunking the myth of AI was brought to you by Microsoft Azure. If you’d like to find out more how they could help you out leverage your existing systems for much more head on over to microsoft.11fs.com Special Guests: Charlie Wood and Scott Seely.
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Ross and David sit down with Eric Fulwiler, Executive Director of VaynerMedia and Teana Baker-Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer of Coinfloor. The group discuss the latest news hitting the fintech space this week, including:
Challenger bank fury over delays to RBS funding scheme, Revolut reported suspected money laundering, EU wants more competition in fintech, Klarna’s payment card, M-Pesa looks to Ethiopia for expansion, Paypal invests in cross border payments, Payment rules create $1bn in losses for Chinese giants, and Kodak’s bitcoin rigs have had their moment as well as many more stories.
We kick things off with challenger banks getting angry over the extended delays to RBS' £775M fund to boost competition in the small business banking market. Payouts have been delayed due to failure to make senior hires on time.
Several challengers including Santander, Starling, Metro Bank and CYBG have been preparing bids for the cash, but a number have complained of being left in the dark and out of pocket because of the delays. Communication around the scheme has been “threadbare” but challengers are spending a lot of time and money on their applications for a piece of the fund. The panel discusses whether challenger banks should be relying on this funding at all or indeed spending their own money on applications, whether the banks are just desperate for free money and why executive hiring is having any impact on handing out funding.
Next up we move on to the news that Revolut discovering a spate of money laundering on its digital payments system. There are huge implications from a KYC perspective, after HSBC were basically deemed complicit in Mexican money laundering after its KYC was deemed too lax. The panel discusses what this might mean for Revolut especially in regards to their application for a banking license and the larger reputational impact for fintech in general. Then the panel moves on to the EU pushing for more competition in the fintech space. Is the international body behind the times and making unfair assumptions of the industry? How can fintech be more competitive and how old does fintech have to be before it starts to count? The panel discusses all these things and has some interesting takes on the issue.
Moving on to better news for the fintech industry, Klarna is launching a payment card and is preparing for expansion. Klarna’s 2,000 workers have been divided into 250 teams, each focusing on a specific problem for customers and how to solve it. Does this prove that digital is a small team sport? Klarna also faces difficulties breaking into the US and UK, two countries with little history of consumers paying by invoices. So, the question remains, can Klarna make headway in the UK? And calling back to the previous story, the panel examines whether this is creating competition within EU fintech.
Speaking of expansions, M-Pesa looks to move in to Ethiopia. Could M-Pesa transform the Ethiopian economy in the same way as it has in Kenya? The panel discusses the state of fintech in the country which has no transference options in place at all and 'archaic' systems are ready for reform to help the economy. Tieing in seamlessly to the story, the panel looks at Paypal investing in cross border payments with P-PRO, a cross border payment platform for merchants looking to accept payments from other countries. The panel discuss why PayPal is investing so heavily in the payments space, if anyone previously heard of P-PRO, and how it compares to Mastercard enlisting Worldpay to push Vocalink's Pay by Bank app.
Staying international, the panel next looks at losses in revenue from payment rules from the People's Bank of China. Chinese giants Alibaba and Tencent have lost $1BN thanks to these rules, but is $1BN a big deal to Alibaba and Tencent? Is 1.7% of revenue a big loss when your businesses move trillions of dollars? Is this move by the PBOC unprecedented, and is it likely to be rolled out anywhere else? Moving on to the tailend of the show, a scheme to rent out Kodak-branded bitcoin mining rigs has collapsed. The company, Spotlite, has had the scheme blocked by the US financial watchdog. This follows from the scheme being dubbed a scam by some critics, it's worth noting that Kodak and Spotlite had claimed customers would make $375 a month from the rigs but forgotten that mining Bitcoin becomes more difficult over time.
And finally, Prime Day technicial issues resulted in a Prime Fail from 3pm EST when moments beforehand reports came in that Amazon's website wasn't working. Amazon issued a statement to say they were working on it at 5PM and instead of deals people were shown pictures of dogs looking sad. Customers missed out on deals, baskets were unexpectedly emptied and the “view deals” UX was taking people on an endless loop.
All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!
Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.
Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com
This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill. Special Guests: Eric Fulwiler and Teana Baker-Taylor. -
Some people think it's lucky to be able to make decisions, but Howard Lindzon doesn't see things that way. It's about practice, not being paralysed by indecision and limiting your options to two positive outcomes and then picking the one that you're able to live with. You've gotta keep moving forward and to keep everyone around you motivated and wanting to move forward.
CEOs are vital to the nature of a startup, they need to be able to pull their company in the direction they want to grow in as fast as they can and keep everyone who's with them excited and interested. Sam and Howard also discuss how not everyone can be a great CEO but that isn't a bad thing. The world needs great second-in-commands and people all down the hierarchy, without them there'd be no companies.
Being a CEO means being a great recruiter and communicator in addition to raising money. You can't just be good at one of them, all three are vital to being a CEO. It's important to ensure staff know what you need them to be doing, when, and most importantly, why.
Angel investors are focused on creating the best possible team for the company, finding the specialists who are capable of operating in the space like a scalpel because they know what they're good at, how to do it, and are solely focused on getting their tasks done. And most importantly, trusting the others to achieve what they need to do too.
We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.
If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!
This episode was produced by Ollie Judge and edited by Michael Bailey. Special Guest: Howard Lindzon. - Show more