London Fintech Podcast

On the show this week we have a bumper edition – the future of leveraged trading, online/in-app education, IT Dev, user experience design, new ESMA rules – and much more, Responsible for this fireworks show is Ivan Gowan CEO of multi-award winning capital.com. who have125 staff and over £30m of capital. In the previous episode LFP105 […]

The ultimate disintermediation in FS is for folks to directly buy shares/binds directly and cut out the whole investment management industry as we know it. Even better if it’s cost free to deal. This amazing proposition is becoming real as Freetrade’s core offering gets rolled out to its first users and we are joined today […]

Michael is the author of “The Fintech Financing and Performance Report” and expert on strategy and innovation in financial services. In this show we dive into the third edition of his report and dive into the critical and fascinating topics of how UK Fintechs have funded themselves, what their valuations have done over time and […]

Once upon a time P2P was a simple thing. Now it’s more accurate to see it as online lending and borrowing. Models vary, regulation varies, the most successful platform was started by a bank, direct lenders have wholesale flows in funding retail or corporate outflows, others have just retail funds and others mixed. Quite a […]

App Banks are following many courses with many motivations. Who better to guide us through this ever more complicated maze of motivations and destinations than Ricky Knox, Founder and CEO of Tandem Money/Bank and serial entrepreneur sans pareil. inter alia (alia being things like Insead) Ricky founded GSM Systems in 2003 (where he remains non-exec […]

An Insuretch insider said to me “if there is one firm that is doing something truly radical in insurance its Laka”. Aha. So here we are – Laka on the LFP. Laka are re-slicing and dicing the paradigm that led to so much in lending/borrowing but has never really got out of the hanger in […]

Time flies when you are enjoying ourselves and for todays special celebration we have one taboo topic and one private topic so ideally suited to a solo act.  For the main course we get a peep into my upcoming book on the Fintech Board – or more broadly the development of a SmallCo Board as […]

Next to no new Fintechs, and no Insuretechs see themselves as building the “full stack”. Rather for many, once one has a product the secret is successful partnering. Jimmy Williams, CEO of Urban Jungle, an Insuretech for the renting generation has developed a succinct a methodology for partnering success and shares it on this show. […]

Since Anil and MarketInvoice were last on the LFP, and no doubt as a direct result, they have gone from having done ~£1/2bn to ~£2bn and remain the Invoice Financing market leaders as well as having expanded their product range. Anil joins us today to discuss all things cashflow re the vital financing of UK SMEs which […]

Many electrons have been agitated to produce patterns of light and dark on this topic. Which is probably more interesting aphenomenon than the average article on Open Banking. Ignore it we cannot however and uber-Fintech Guru (in the true sense, not self-penned LinkedIn encomium) Nigel Verdon, founder of Currency Cloud and now founder and CEO […]

Which UK FIntech does $3trn of business per annum and are in 7 countries? Well I guess for readers on the website the pic above is a bit of a hint. David Mercer CEO LMAX Exchange joins us today to dive into the subject of marketplaces which have been a fundamental part of culture forever […]

Which Fintech started in a basement in Stockwell, has done over £65bn of FX business, do over 1 million transfers a year with 600 staff in 7 offices, whose chairman is a former deputy Governor of the Bank of England and according to price comparison sites offer better prices than other Fintech FX players on […]

In this New Year Special I’ll survey the state of the art and present a report card for each of the main  Fintech sectors – P2P, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Money, App-only banks, Insuretech, Digital I.M., Regtech, Payments and a deeper dive into the leading AI of 2017. We also examine the broader context for Fintech – namely […]

Data is the new oil ‘innit. Fintechs use it by the bucketload don’t they? Incumbents are slow off the blocks aren’t they? What if a lot of this is simply not true? What if its hype and spin? What is the reality? We are joined today by Max Pell CEO of Validis a Fintech based […]

This week a bumper-packed Tour d’Horizon/Tour de Force. William Lazonick is best known for his iconic “2014 Harvard Business Review’s best article” Profits Without Prosperity: Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and Leave Most Americans Worse Off His essential insight is that “shareholder value” has become an ideology of value extraction entirely lacking a theory of value creation. […]

Much Fintech (online wealth managers qv) is just “putting lipstick on a pig” – digitising existing processes at oldskool prices. No-one can say this about CrossLend who securitise loans ~200,000 times cheaper than oldskool prices and securitise down to one single loan as small as €1,500 :-! Furthermore oldskool securitisation has all too often been a […]

The ONS has stated that the average UK worker will end up with eleven pension pots in their life. What a nightmare to track and manage for decades! What can Fintech bring to the party? In this episode Romi Savova CEO and founder of online pensions provider Pension Bee joins us to discuss where pensions […]

The best post-“post crisis” banks have leaped ahead and are well on the way to leveraging Fintech to make themselves even stronger. Alexander Ball Fintech Manager at ING talks to us about a bank which has over 100 partnerships with Fintechs, the best known of which perhaps is Kabbage whereby ING clients can borrow up to […]

52% of UK SMEs based floodplains don’t have flood cover! Insurers struggle to insure flood risk due to the difficulty of modelling and assessing the economic impact. Many people/businesses are unable to get insurance cover at all. Every year, globally, there are $50bn of flood caused economic losses of which only $9bn are covered by […]

A year ago in LFP060 (currently the 2nd most downloaded episode) we covered Open Banking/PSD2 from a Regulatory perspective. In this episode Louise Beaumont argues forcefully that Reg & Tech perspectives are “necessary but not sufficient”. To do Open Banking “well” means to utterly rethink ones strategy. Louise is the co-Chair of the Open Bank Working […]