London Fintech Podcast

Can InsureTech change the landscape of insurance as a whole or will it just enhance parts of the value chain? Conventional wisdom says the latter but the appearance of a model called “Reinsurance as a Service” could have far wider repercussions. Traditionally insurance (in all its very diverse/speciated forms) is in three layers. Brokers. Insurers […]

Investment management – despite its known deficiencies – has been least disrupted perhaps so far by “Fintech”. The first wave of I.M. Fintechs (pre- & up to 2015) promised “democratisation” but have made relatively little headway. The awfully named “roboadvisers” are neither robo nor advisers but are ludicrously hyped. There’s also the rather challenging question […]

Squirrel’s self-description is: a smart new way of budgeting and saving that helps you resist that temptation to spend. We work in partnership with employers, local authorities, housing associations and credit unions to bring better money management to the widest possible audience. Squirrel’s 7,000 clients range from those on benefits to those earning more than […]

Many Fintechs have successfully gone from Startup to Scaleup. But none have gone to true Growth company yet. Today we are joined for a Master Class by a man with a phenomenal growth story to tell. Faisal Husain has taken Synechron from an idea to 7,000 people in 18 countries worldwide and generates over $400m […]

Trussle are the UK’s first online mortgage broker, have just raised £4.5m in a Series A and have an exclusive partnership with the FTSE listed property search giant Zoopla. So they are doing well for a two year old startup

“Everyone” frets over financial advice in the Fintech Age. Regulators set out to “protect the consumer”, worthy bodies talk no end about the need to protect “people” (never themselves oddly – generally they imply (/mean) folks of lesser education/wealth) and the rest of us are just confused over the labyrinthine rules around tax, savings and […]

Happy New Year boys and girls

Reformation or refactoring of banking is the Holy Grail of the Fintech Revolution. Do that and the revolution is a big deal. Get nowhere near and its all rather marginal. So-called challenger banks have ended up rather same-y. Will “App-only” banks end up going down the same route forced my micro-regulation and micro-supervision into the […]

2016 is the year Fintech realised it had to aim for making a profit. Very few do and for the tiny handful that do its mostly “minimal”. Solving this problem is absolutely vital for the Fintech revolution. This is the story of a Fintech that has done just that – satisfying customers, staff and shareholders. […]

Everything exists in a context. FS is a social construct that has differed massively over time and space, always existing in a context of Policy and Regulation.  Over my 30 years in FS I have seen deregulation time turn into hyper-regulation. Talk about pendulums (pendula?). Where do these changes in Policy and Regulation come from? […]

After organising nearly 1,000 folks in the O2 for Europe’s largest P2P conference ever I managed to grab Peter long enough to have a fascinating tour of the globe and P2P sitrep in the three major hubs. Peter Renton has perhaps has more of a broad and deep understanding of P2P worldwide than anyone. When […]

I am delighted to be joined today by Dr Tristan Fletcher Research Director at Thought Machine to talk about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Financial Services. His Linkedin strapline is “I apply state of the art prediction methods from the Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) academic community to real world problems” This is a mega […]

I am delighted to be joined on the show today once again by Rhydian Lewis CEO at Ratesetter to talk about the ultra-hot topic of provision funds in p2p/marketplace lending. Rhydian was on in the early days back in LFP019 in an episode talking about P2P beyond the metaphors. That’s a good theme for today […]

I am delighted to be joined today by Jonathan Howe UK Insurance lead at Price Waterhouse Coopers. As long time listeners will know I am very reluctant to give anyone a big picture topic on anything. Most folks are experts on one coalface and very few on the whole coal mine. However Jonathan is a […]

I’m delighted to be joined by Paul Thomalla expert on the upcoming changes in open-banking, SVP at ACI Worldwide, member of the Payments Strategy Forum (PSF) and board member at Nexo Standards. Upcoming changes re opening payments to non-banks and opening access to bank account data will change the industry. On top of this we […]

I have the pleasure to be joined today by Will Wynne MD and co-founder of Smart Pension who have had the fastest 0-60 of any Fintech that has been on the show to date and it’s a record that’s hard to beat. How did they do it? Listen up and all will be revealed – […]

Today I have the pleasure to be joined today by Laurent Kssis MD of CEC Capital who has worked in the ETF industry for 14years. We’ve spent a few episodes recently in the heady heights of the super-big picture so let’s get back to the coalface and dive in depth into an important area of […]

I have the pleasure to be joined today by Geoff Miller, CEO of Afaafa and former CEO of GLI Finance which he built from having no presence in AltFi to having over two dozen share stakes and loan agreements. If existing FS has gone far to far in the direction of endless PC box-ticking – […]

I am  delighted to welcome Rob Moffat, Partner at Balderton Capital to dive into the topic of Venture Capital and Fintech.  As I aim to present London Fintech in the round I have been – for a long time – keeping my eye open for a friendly VC to have on the show. This has […]

I am delighted to be joined this week by Professor John Kay – one of the UK’s leading economists and outstanding authority on Financial Services to discuss the truly vast potential that still exists for Fintech to disrupt FS. Fintech as we know it now has so far only put its toe into that ocean […]

Less than a week ago the UK voted to leave the EU. This comes against a background of severe problems for listed US marketplace lenders, a worlwide tailing off of institutional capital into the sector and only a tiny number of Fintechs having achieved profitability (many years after launch). I thought it time to take […]

Cormac Leech is co-founder of Liberum Alternative Finance who are a (the?) specialist strategic adviser and development partner to the UK Alternative Finance sector, focusing on online direct and marketplace lending and equity crowdfunding. Liberum have done some $2bn of the largest P2P investment fund originations in the UK – notably P2PGI now a listed […]

This week I am delighted to welcome Jon Vollemaere CEO of R5FX to talk about the realpolitik of Fintech Scaleups, Asia Fintech and how relevant the “Fintech” label is and isn’t over the journey from being a Fintech Startup to Scaleup. R5 offers a new electronic marketplace for emerging market foreign exchange (EMFX) and electronic […]

This week we dive deep into business overdrafts with James Sherwin-Smith CEO of Growth Street. If you overdrafts sound dull consider the fact that they are the most commonly used form of financing for SMEs in the UK and that their supply has fallen by 40-50% in the past twelve months :-O That’s enough to […]

Did you know that the world’s first P2P FX firm was formed in 1998 and is listed on the Toronto Venture Exchange and cross-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange? No, me neither. Midpoint, formed in 1998, describe themselves as the world’s first authentic peer-to-peer (‘P2P’) international foreign currency and payments platform, have a US patent […]