One major way of innovating is to move into a domain with transferable and out of the box skills/ideas/technology. This presents obvious opportunities for radical change yet naturally produces equally obvious challenges. In this episode we look at how 4 co-founders created a payments infrastructure Fintech that now connects an amazing 7.5 billion b…

The Governance of FS as a whole affects all of our lives as we saw in 2008 let alone in many individual examples of FS/Fintech businesses failing and losing clients money. In our digital age virtually all of our money is digital and next to no-one sees a share certificate any more so all of our investments are digital. Thus what might appear to be …

The tech world focuses heavily on the “succeed fast or fail fast” model of tech growth. In part this is as VC firms generally have limited life funds and hence cannot handle slower models but is also as the tech press loves the hype/condemn cycle implicit in this. However generally most businesses do not follow this model. Whilst rapid success come…

The Founder(s) is(are) at the heart of creating something new that literally never existed before. However they very much do not do this in vacuo needing to entice and hire a team below them but also, less well understood, a team around them. The surround will at some point coalesce into a formal Board (as opposed to a pro forma Board for Day0 – an…

As always there is a fascinating phenomenon when the globalised world of tech meets the localised worlds of custom, people, rules and regulations. As recently as LFP243 we dived in to the world of tech as a whole in Berlin and today we dive into Fintech in France. Needless to say France is a massive market, well banked and a real venue for Fintech.…

In this episode we take the opportunity to talk to one of the most credit risk experienced men in Fintech who has ranged from a dozen years at seminal Capital One through managing Barclay’s £40 bn portfolio, being CRO at Funding Circle to now founding his own Fintech to mechanise further short term SME liquidity financing, Jerome’s stats are that b…

This 2024 New Year Special forms the sixth and final in a series of six (there will be no more) about how technology – and in this episode way wider forces – are changing us directly for the better (read huge software upgrades) in order to overcome, in a velvet revolution, empowered tyrants. I said in last years 2023 New Year Special that “It is by…

In this Xmas special we zoom out from Fintech to Tech as a whole in one of Europe’s coolest capitals – Berlin. Ivan is a great person to guide us through the scene having spent many years in the Ur-tech hub of San Francisco/Silicon Valley. This also means that he understands both the outsiders perspective on Berlin tech as well as now an experience…

Saudi Arabia is a country that increasingly confounds stereotypes and expectations – an example being a YouTuber who has visited every country in the world choosing it for his honeymoon. At the same time it has undergone a phenomenal journey literally in a lifetime from a very low economic standard of living to super-high. As a result, like China, …

Why buy alternative assets? Well in extremis what else would you buy? Bonds have finished their ca. 40yr bull market and yield well below the rate of inflation. The FTSE to pick one has gone sideways over the past 5 yrs and is not greatly ahead after a decade. And as for UK property it’s soft at best, Gold is going nowhere and so forth. Naturally a…

Back in the 70s getting mortgages took months – there was a mortgage queue (&before techies get over-excited about how “bad” this was it was one of the factors restraining insane bull markets in residential property). Fast forward and the median mortgage in the UK is granted in 19 business days which is still a long time to wait given the stresses …

The speed of change is super-rapid and nowhere more than in payments where advance rapidly leapfrogs advance. For the past two years “orchestration” has been The Thing (see eg LFP213 a deep dive into that topic). However now we have the latest greatest kid on the block the idea of curation. If orchestration solved the challenge of the techies namel…

The world is quite a large place but who better to cover the situation and trend in real-time payments than Craig Ramsey Head of Global Real Time Payments at ACI Worldwide who process around a billion payments per day with total value in the trillions of dollars. In this episode we dive into real time payments in the UK, Europe, the US and within t…

Scaling any successful technology firm (who can expand so much faster than ~”bricks and mortar” firms) involves considerable challenges. These challenges are only compounded by challenges with surrounding infrastructure which, shall we say, aren’t even around the world. What may be taken for granted in the world’s leading tech hubs may be conspicuo…

It was not that long ago that business lending decisions took days, weeks, or even months. This lengthy period – and then need to perhaps apply to multiple banks was a severe challenge for many organisations, many of whom over time have gone bust whilst going through such processes. But what if using the best of technology this extended time-period…

Although the title is apparently three-fold re episode topic the Chinese Fintech market is very different from other markets we have touched upon so far and one that we definitely need to dive into. You will have heard of Alipay but may not know that as long as a decade ago they overtook Paypal to become the worlds largest online/mobile payments pl…

Over a decade into the Fintech revolution its a rare episode that covers something entirely fresh and furthermore a show that I end up thinking I should check out downloading the app – and not just me – everyone who uses insurance (that’ll be everyone) may well do too. Rnwl promise to take the hassle out of all those email renewals at random times …