London Fintech Podcast

Investment risk has changed radically from what regulators and the media propound. A prime example is that with negative real interest rates and at the end of a secular 40 yr bond bull market the idea of bonds being “low risk investments” is nuts yet widely followed in asset allocation. Furthermore as we touched on in LFP197 on the dollar, hyperinflation and much more and LFP199 on Gold the trend...

Technology pervades our world more than ever and conditions us and our existence ever more. But I believe it is not well-understood at a philosophical level, nor are its impacts at an existential level. Two great thinkers about technology and its impact on man, society and civilisation in the 20thC were  Oswald Spengler and Jacques Ellul. The whole panoply of problems we face now from depression t...

Gold has been much in the news recently with Russia putting a Gold-floor under its currency to spectacular effect (almost as if desire for infinitely printed fiat paper is wearing off…) and offering to accept payment for exports in Gold the US sanctions/de-SWIFTing/and theft of Central Bank Assets (never happened in history) has spectacularly backfired. But what if you too could have your own pers...

There are at least 70 cities in Europe which have at least one unicorn in them – a very different pattern from the US/UK ecosystems. Over 20 of these cities are in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). There is thus far more to CEE than a place to near-offshore your tech or dev team. In this episode Adam gives us both a tour de force et tour d’horizon of the vast region that is CEE –  – I was certainl...

Where money in major economies is and where it is going is very concerning right now – look at the list of issues in the episode title, let alone the impact of the ongoing globalist putsch and UN Agendas 21 and 2030. This is a topic that will affect not just FS but the lives of everyone we all know we are more than overdue a dive into this essential topic. In particular we end with practical inves...

Fraud is sadly as old as humanity. However the digital age has created a huge arms race – on the one hand a massive increase in fraudulent attempts, on the other ever-stronger defences. Traditionally anti-fraud was a complex B2B sale but in the digital age where b2b and b2B sales outnumber by far B2B sales (SME/BigCo respectively) this all needs to change. SEON , despite being founded in only 2018...

In this show Patrick Dunne joins us to discuss how Boards changed in the 80s/90s/00s as a prelude to the significant shifts in Boards happening, and needing to happen, today. As the world changes massively and as tech changes only-ever accelerate how does this change what Boards are required to do, how they do it and what kind of people you now need on Boards. Patrick has written four books on asp...

Civilisation I believe is at a crossroads. The globalists’ road has a stench that we can smell from the crossroads. Their dystopian future has been designed for far longer and in far more detail than anyone who has not researched it would ever imagine. It is no secret, no paranoia, and is documented in the public writings of the UN, the WEF and many more NGOs and private clubs of oligarchs. It is...

With the long-planned centralised ID (via pretext of “medical passports”) juggernaut bowling down the road towards us and ushering in a Western version of the Chinese Social Credit Score where your Human Rights, rather than being God-given, become a function of  your obedience to ever-more politician-decided criteria it seems a great occasion to discuss what an alternative might look like. No less...

In the hundreds of incoming requests to be on the LFP there are few that truly stand out as something fresh and innovative that I haven’t heard of countless times before. Tulipshare is one such rara avis being the first on the show who do GovernanceTech. They are a broker-dealer through which you can buy shares – so far so normal – but with one important twist. They also have campaigns to change c...

Creating a global firm without raising equity is rare but possible and an important route with many advantages for certain types of business. which many young entrepreneurs are relatively unfamiliar with. Ben Richmond founder and CEO of RegTech CUBE certainly knows this path intimately and shares with us his insiders experiences having built CUBE from inception in 2011 to today a global business w...

Serving the sole trader or microcompany is super-important right now as economies and indeed societies continue to try and build themselves back from the ground up after widespread government actions in 2019 which massively favoured MegaCo and governments never-ending pork-barreling monetary printing presses at the expense of the little guy. In this context we define […]

In this episode we cover the super-big picture from the fascinating origins of the US pension market which is barely a century old through the complexities of the current market with some 40 million Americans having no access to a retirement plan and looking into the future how official advice over so-called “low risk investments” […]

This episode is a sign of the state-centralist times. Fintech grew in a very different world from our ever-expanding State, super-high tax-burdens, massive regulation et al. However why should SMEs leave all the food on the table for better-resourced BigCos to take? Especially when it falls into that vital category of “non-dilutive funding”. In this […]

Every startup in the tech world is after a “realisation” – or put in other terms a point in time at which someone puts a real as opposed to notional valuation on your firm – when you sell out in whole via a Trade Sale or in part via an IPO. But how do you […]

is it possible to do Customer Service well whilst not going bankrupt employing thousands of PhDs in Customer Service at megabucks? And back to an old favourite of FS vs Tech why do we even need it if the tech quotes works unquotes? In retail FS or even FS as a whole Customer/Client Service is essential. […]

Currency Cloud are one of London’s oldest Fintechs being founded over a decade ago. As they recently sold themselves for £700m to Visa – in cash – they clearly know something about the entire startup-realisation process. Big time. One of the aspects whose importance grows along the journey which co-founder Richard shares with us is […]

In this episode we have an awesome deep-dive by Gert into what Network-based Finance is – a super-cool topic even Google doesn’t know about (within an hour of this LFP release it became the only example :-O). We cover how, in a sense, it inverts the whole “Open Banking” paradigm putting the opening of transactions […]

I can think of very few UK Fintechs that dominate their sector as successfully as CapitalRise who have something of a monopoly of being the only independent prime real estate property finance provider. Not only that but to date they have an unbeatable 0% loss-rate on loans that have returned ~9%pa to investors. The Credit markets […]

How one engages with a Bank and how Banks engage have always been essential aspects of FS which is a complex ecosystem of specialists. This is – like much – all-changing right now. ClearBank have recently published a report entitled “How well are Fintechs served by banks?” which provides some depth to this topic. Simon […]

What kind of value-add most helps founders and their companies? Or if you prefer what sun, what rain and what compost makes founders trees fruit better and faster? It’s a vital topic for the economy. QED Investors is a leading VC firm focused on investing in early stage – hence their knowledge of growing seedlings […]

Richard has an astonishing 50yrs experience in investing in young companies and helping to grow them, starting with 3i in the 1970s when they were next to the only institutional provider of development capital through to being a former chair of the BVCA and this year having released a thoroughly updated version of his book […]

Fintech is increasingly getting well beyond providing the simplest of transactions and deep into the complex end of FS. Supply@Me Capital are listed on the UK Stock Exchange and recently acquired Singaporean firm Tradeflow Capital.  They provide inventory financing by securitising manufacturers’ and trading firms’ inventory in a very interesting fashion leading to a new […]

Two topics this week… What are the major trends in Insurtech in the US, UK, Europe and China? Secondly Small Business insurance, general liability professional liability insurance and so forth can be hard to acquire at commercially sensible terms and thus many contractors or home repair folk end up giving up on potential work as […]

All Fintechs in one country will have long since sorted identity/AML/KYC and so forth. But what happens when they need to scale in other countries or even go global? Like many things in Fintech this was a hard challenge only a few years back. However now it is made much easier by the likes of […]