Fintech

I see more and more stories about banks messing up customer accounts, system outages, data mismanagement, issues with technology and more. This is the one thing a bank cannot mess up. Airlines may mess up a booking; Amazon may mess up a delivery; BT or AT&T may mess up a connection; but a bank messing…

A new series of Shark’s Den is about to launch. You know the one, where investors meet young people who pitch ideas and, if they like them, they invest a bit of money for 80% of the business? I love the way the sharks ask questions like: How much are you making? What’s the price?…

From July 12, I will be chairing FinTech Week London. It’s my first time leaving home since February 2020, and a major moment as it’s also the first physical conference on FinTech that I’ve seen so far (Money 2020 and more to come). FinTechWeek London takes place from July 12-16 both in London and streaming…

Just received Findexable’s annual report on FinTech hubs and developments, which finds San Francisco, London and New York as the key FinTech hubs of the world. Behind those cities, Montevideo (Uruguay), Hangzhou (China) and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) are making great gains. What’s going on? Here’s the outline in the intro to the second edition of…

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits that should be in there,…

Money 2020 has just dropped an interesting report talking about FinTech 2.0 (although I’m already on FinTech 5.0). In fact 2.0 is a pretty old idea, as outlined in this blog from June 2016, so I think the context of the report is a bit off but the content is pretty good. Here’s the Executive…

As someone who has set up a number of small businesses, there are three major tasks that I hate: Doing the accounts Tax returns Invoices As the business owner, all I want to do is my job, to have fun, to get on with creating more customers and more business. However, the issue with accounts,…

I posted a joke the other day. The joke was that we had not ordered anything online yesterday, and our usual delivery guy called by today to check we were OK. The joke made me realise something. The realisation is that we really have pivoted from a world of stores and streets to a world…

FinTech is reaching parts of the planet that could never be reached before. Actually, it’s not FinTech. It’s the network. By way of example, way back in 1995, I was asked if I seriously thought someone could make a payment from the top of Mount Everest? I said yes, and they did in 2013. Since…

Very interesting article on AltFi about FinTech unicorns tripling in value this year. Here’s a few selected lines: In the first quarter of 2021 alone, UK fintechs raised more than $2.9bn in funding, an increase of 331 per cent on the same period in the year before … in June 2020, Checkout.com became one of the first fintechs…