LFP068 – The London Fintech Podcast’s 2016 Highlights and 2017 Awards

London Fintech Podcast

Happy New Year boys and girls May 2017 be a great one for you and yours! This is the New Year Special where I look back at my 9 highlights from 2016, dish out 10 immensely prestigious awards and take a peak at 2017.

So without futher ado lets kick off the awards…

Best LFP Stories – jointly awarded to Paul Thomalla for his Ronnie and Nancy Reagan in a Baker Street Pub story and Bob Jones for his tales of having been at the first concert Ringo played with the Beatles and what the Cavern club was really like.

– last years New Year Special had two themes – #indie and #media. #Indie seems to have disappeared as a vibe in Fintech in 2016. Indie as a vibe only seems possible in mostly unregulated sectors.

– if #indie has died a death then the media remains a key theme for us all and its been a very media focused year after all how do we find out about anything Fintech or broader without media, mainstream alt or social?

– in this light I give out three of the ten awards to broader-than-Fintech media concerns – after all Fintech is a part of broader society – it won’t work that well if the rest of society is on fire So some media awards to help you all find more reliable sources of true news…

Best Media of the Year – Russell Brand’s Trews

Best Media Checker – Project Censored see eg Project Censored Top 25 Censored Stories of 2015-16

Best Non-Fintech Journalist – jointly awarded to Cassette Boy and Jonathan Pie

– and onto Fintech… 2016 was the year perhaps when Fintech 1.0 ran out of steam – no-one is now predicting that P2P, Equity Crowdfunding or Bitcoin for example will change the world

– I am often asked how to get into the Fintech world and always recommend the following avenue hence gets the Best Fintech Networking Group Eddie George’s New Finance which passed 10,000 members in 2016

– my nine key highlights of 2016:

1. LFP055 John Kay on re-forming Finance
2. LFP065 Lord Turner on Policy and Regulation – for his clear and I believe spot on views on regulation (“we need a small number of powerful regulations rather than micro-supervision”) Lord Turner is awarded Best Regulator
3. Payments – going in the right direction… (pace war on cash concerns)
4. P2P‘s challenging year.
   • Best Fintech Newsletter goes to AltFi’s Ryan Weeks for his weekly newsletter on Alternative Finance in the UK
   • Regulation. Landbay’s needing to stop pre-funding of loans to get approved. The immensely slow pace of regulatory approvals for almost the entire market
   • PeerIQ’s stat that in the US in 16H2 PeerIQ 70% of US P2P loans were securitised… as Kadhim Shubber titled it “Online Lending has been fully assimilated by the Financial Borg”. Which seems an appropriate time to hand out to him Best Fintech Journalist to Kadhim Shubber for consistent bravery with the sword of truth cutting thru the BS with hardcore analysis
   • the FCA’s interim review of “crowdfunding” regulation
5. LFP063 on AI and Machine Learning with Dr Tristan Fletcher
6. Insuretech – the key difference between enhancement and disruption in Insuretech (and this applies more broadly perhaps) as clearly elaborated by Jonathan Howe in LFP061
7. Venture Capital – the woes and the outperformers as highlighted well in LFP056 by Rob Moffat of Balderton Capital who included a must-check-out guide on how to seduce a VC into giving you funding
8. Corporate Governance – a great exposition by Geoff Miller in LFP057 on why its not PC box-ticking but vital to the long term health of any company, Fintechs included (but notably ommitted right now)
9. Blockchain generated much verbiage … if I could face giving an award for hype it would win it. But as we live in a world of hype lets not award hypesters

– so the most awaited award for Best Fintech is jointly awarded to Blue Motor Finance (for solving Fintech’s profitability problem) and to Smart Pension (for getting 120,000 clients (!!). Phenomenal achievements in both cases

– turning on to 2017 the two hot areas of Fintech 2.0 (which has a far greater true disruptive potential) are Payments and Banking

– comparisons of Fintech 1.0 and Fintech 2.0

– how Fintech is becoming more how we are all changing our use of Financial Services

– a key player in refactoring our concept of personal financial services/banking which gets a commendation for 2016 performance (nigh on 84,000 customers from a standing start) is Monzo which gets my award fot Best Fintech To Watch 2017

– We are back to guests in the next episode

– Happy New Year folks!

And much much more

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