London Fintech Podcast

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 […]

In a world ever-more focused on transactions and digitisation what place is there for relationship-banking? Apparently not a lot, yet the market-leader – SVB – wholly embraces this approach over the whole journey from Startup to FTSE. In this show we discuss what relationship banking means in the 21stC for one of the hottest sectors […]

Payments are being revolutionised. One of the most fascinating examples is Ripplenet – Ripple’s approach to inverting the old model of slow large payments to super-fast, immediate, small payments (the general trend) which will change payments forever. Ripplenet “an internet of value” is used by over 300 Financial Institutions in more than 45 countries, as […]

What is called Venture Capital is most of the time actually Venture Equity – the predominant funding model for Startups/ScaleUps. But in many sectors, Fintech included, some UnlistedCos are Very large – valuations in the billions. These are no small companies. Traditional corporate finance theory says (correctly) that equity is expensive and should always be […]

Draper Esprit are one of London’s longer-established VCs and with investments in the likes of Revolut, Transferwise, Thought Machine, Seedrs, Crowdcube and Freetrade might know a thing or two about Fintech. Draper Esprit, like Augmentum who we had on the show last year are also a listed AIM and thus also can offer finance not […]

Marwan  joins us to discuss global payments for small businesses. He has been in payments for many years and was first a founder in 2002 so speaks from long experience of both. Veem is a global payments network used by small businesses around the world which allows them to pay their vendors, suppliers and contractors anytime, […]

The Tech press is full of unicorns – but these are almost always “on paper”. Those companies that someone has bought for over a billion – be it a trade sale or IPO – are far rarer. Clay Wilkes has created both starting with just an idea. Galileo Financial Technologies which he co-founded, powers 95% […]

Iwocapay is a new business venture from iwoca, one of London’s leading Fintechs, to offer payment terms as a service. Metaphorically this is a cross between a domestic version of trade finance – helping finance a supply chain – with an oldschool (and rather harder to get these days) bank overdraft – ie a flexible […]

Cuvva have some hundred employees, 400,000 UK clients and 5% of the short-term UK car insurance market which is a phenomenal achievement for any Fintech in any sector. In this episode founder Freddy Macnamara joins us to discuss how price comparison websites have changed the insurance industry, the regulatory review of pricing in re and […]

Online payments are expensive – directly for merchants and indirectly for consumers as the price is obviously higher due to the merchants having a ~3% cost of payments. But in a world where I as a consumer could pay you as a merchant directly from my phone if you simply gave me your sort code […]

One thing serial entrepreneurs learn if the value of a Good Board in helping drive business success and avoiding car crashes along the way. The ne plus ultra is having a great Chairman. Brian Basham has founded many businesses and chaired many businesses. In 1976 he founded the Broad Street Group with £100 he had […]

The trend in recent decades has been to ever-more flexible working contracts – be it gig economy, independent consultants or the freelancing/project-based work that sits in between. Gig-ers have a company app to engage and pay and indies a company around them. Freelancing et al have always been challenging to administer for both the buyer […]

One reason that as the Fintech revolution proceeds Fintechs can do more ambitious things is that there an increasing number of back-end service providers that they can plug into. In this episode Joanne Dewar, CEO of back-end payments services provider GPS – who work with 40 issuing banks globally, and operate programmes with 90+ APIs […]

In LFP152 we took a strategic look at the post-Covid landscape. In this show Julian Cork, COO of Landbay, guides us through the tactical responses by one of the UK’s most solid Fintechs – £1/2bn buy-to-let mortgages written to date and zero losses.   However as to risk “the past is not necessarily a guide […]

It is a cliche to say “the world changed forever” but macroeconomically and microeconomically it has – not because of the C19 virus but because of governmental responses to it. As the landscape for Fintech and indeed all firms has changed for – well decades at this rate in this show I do a one-off […]

As we have repeatedly heard profitability is a major challenge in Fintech. In this episode Tim Nicolle CEO of Trade Finance Fintech Primadollar describes his journey to working out the necessary building blocks to profitability. As someone who has had his own businesses for some 30yrs he has had more experience than most with these […]

The largest financial transaction of your life is also your last – dying! Get it wrong and Boris gets more money for vanity bridges and your relatives are left with a mess on their hands and potentially plenty of squabbles. Get it right and it is smooth for them and you minimise being taxed twice […]

Today the LFP has Dan Kiernan as guest host and instead I am in the guest seat to discuss my long in the making recently released book on the Unlisted Board The Realpolitik Of The Unlisted Company Board – Making Your Board An Engine Of Growth. This is a behind the scenes account based on […]

Do you known that William Russell’s – the 692nd Lord Mayor of London – first trip was to the US to promote Fintech and that he is perhaps the first Lord Mayor of London to have visited all the regions and is well up-to-speed on regional Fintech? No me neither before we spoke. However his […]

In this Brexiting Age the UK must turn its thoughts once again worldwide – how does one do business around the world? How important is localisation vs globalisation? What role does culture play? Aneesh Varma is the founder of Aire, one of Fintechs longest-standing credit-rating firms who have scored over $10bn of VAR to date. […]