LFP 10th Anniversary Special! The Story of a Decade Of Fintech Evolution As It Happened at the Time

London Fintech Podcast

The past decade has seen the most extraordinary innovation in any business sector in the UK and thence world since the industrial revolution . An amazing outburst of creativity and independent players emerged on the oldest and stodgiest sector of all – FS. The LFP was the first, and most blue-chip podcast to cover this scene starting in 2014. This episode is like a mini-documentary that takes us one fast-forward through the development and progress of Fintech as it happened and was perceived at the time.

A decade of the LFP represents a unique historical archive, a super-rare window, a time-machine to be able to look back in time and see how things were perceived at the time. However such is the volume of episodes that if you took on, as a full-time job, listening to every episode in order it would take you well over a man-month of full-on 9-5 listening to go through the whole evolution. I thought more preferable would be a one hour review of this exciting decade of innovation and entrepreneurialism instead

It is genuinely hard to recollect how much has changed without examining things from a contemporaneous perspective. Witness for example the following anecdote. Talking of chronology and the London tech scene, back in 2014 there was something called Silicon Drinkabout. That was great. Every Friday evening they got some company to sponsor drinks at some pub and one got not just beer but to hang out with tech folk. It’s these little things which really help oil an emerging scene. Anyway the point of recalling this is that even at such a scene the most common question I got when I said I was starting or had just started the London Fintech Podcast was “what’s a podcast?”…

And that was amongst London’s tech savviest folk! Things change so fast these days we tend to forget how fast they’ve changed.

Time does not permit me to cover all episodes – and every episode had many lessons – but I will cover the vast majority, enough to get a real-time on fast forward view of the scene. Doing this exercise certainly surprised me in many cases and I am sure it will too. It reminded me of doing annual appraisals – it was so hard for one’s perceptions not to be overly dominated by the most recent few months compared to rather earlier in the year.

In the next LFP 10th Anniversary Special Celebration Episode I will review the interaction of Tech at large and Society – a super-important topic contextualising not just fintech as such but all of our lives and society. But first let’s review 2014-2024 in the hottest of all scenes that absorbed the most capital.