Episodes

Watch the video episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P2WLceLQ8A&t=2s In this special episode of the London Fintech Podcast, we are privileged to talk with Michael Manelli, the 695th Lord Mayor of London. Michael shares his extraordinary career journey, spanning from his early days in aerospace at Lockheed Martin to becoming a key figure in financial services, fintech, and leading the CIty of London. As a Chartered financial accountant, economist, author, and scientist, Michael ...

Watch the video episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXa2V8bRufA In this episode of The London Fintech Podcast, Tony Clark sits down with Duncan Stevens, Founder of Gretel, to discuss the platform’s mission to reconnect individuals with lost financial assets. Duncan shares how his entrepreneurial journey was shaped by his early life experiences and a strong desire to create purpose-driven solutions. He reflects on the challenges of launching Gretel during the COVID-19 pandemic a...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYg4tPP48A In this episode of The London Fintech Podcast, Tony Clark sits down with Aman Ghei to look at the state of Fintech in Europe. Aman shares his journey from M&A banking, working at Accel and Facebook and games development, to building a career in venture capital. Aman reflects on how these experiences have influenced his approach to investing in post-revenue companies across sectors like payments, banking, and insur...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1M4ODqxthw&t=973s In this episode of the London Fintech Podcast, Tony Clark sits down with Qin En Looi, a leading figure in the Asia fintech space, to explore the future of digital assets and the convergence of fintech and blockchain technology. Qin shares his journey from a traditional Singaporean upbringing to becoming a successful entrepreneur and investor, co-founding Glints and leading Saison Capital. He reflects on how t...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Tk_Qg5Lkiw0 In this episode of the London Fintech Podcast, Tony Clark sits down with Jordan Sinclair, President of Robinhood UK, to explore Robinhood’s ambitious global expansion, with a particular focus on its UK market entry. Jordan brings a wealth of experience from his diverse career, and is now leading Robinhood’s mission to democratise finance by offering commission-free trading, fractional shares, and innovative 24/5 trading access to ...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ny7vDFIVhko In this episode Tony Clark sits down with Paul Caulfield for a deep dive into the troubling world of Financial Crime. Paul is a practising attorney. He’s been a chief legal officer and a chief risk officer at major Financial Institutions, and he’s worked with pretty much all the market regulators in the sector, including the Department of Justice, the OCC, OFAC, and the Fed. Paul is also an adjunct professor at Fordham Law in New ...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7NHLjXfhNqQ In this episode of the London Fintech Podcast, Tony Clark is joined by Louis Glass, the head of CMS’ TMT-sector M&A group in the UK, Managing Partner of the firm’s Tel Aviv office, and a member of the management board. Louis brings a wealth of experience as a corporate lawyer with specialist expertise in tech, internet, and e-commerce transactions. His career spans over two decades, including extensive cross-border work for multin...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/go9S3Ta0xtY In this episode of the London Fintech podcast, Tony Clark talks to Sarah Levy. Sarah has over 25 years of experience launching and growing new brands, however Sarah’s journey to FS is an unconventional one, having crossed over only 4 years ago from a super successful career with Disney, Nickelodeon and Viacom, to leading one of the fastest growing and most progressive digital wealth management firms in the US. There are approxima...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-thOpJvMmF8 Which bank was the first UK clearing bank in 250 years, grew income 91%, last year despite the fintech downturn, doubled its deposits and provides banking services to 250 companies, including 16 other banks? In this episode of the London FinTech podcast, Tony Clark is joined by Charles McManus, Founding CEO of ClearBank. Charles is an international banking professional with over 30 years in global investment banking, wealth manag...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/j5HZhwSuVy4 In this episode of the London Fintech podcast, Tony Clark talks to Niall Cameron. They explore Niall’s journey from heading trading teams to leading digital transformation at HSBC and now building a unique Fintech community through FinTech Connex. There are by some estimates over 26, 000 FinTechs globally. However, as this audience will know, the sector has been on a rollercoaster ride since 2020. Post COVID FinTech funding droppe...

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/j5HZhwSuVy4 In his inaugural episode of the London Fintech Podcast, host Tony Clark takes over from Mike Baliman and takes a deep dive into the world of AI powered forensic accounting. Research shows that 1 in 10 US firms are cooking the books and that accounting manipulation is a $4.7Tn industry problem, in the US alone. Transparently has built an AI platform that can detect and score accounting manipulation, often years ahead of corporate c...

This is the 4th and final episode in the mini-series celebrating the LFP’s 10th anniversary. Having looked at the past decade in Fintech, dived into how an LLM really works and discussed what risks AI does or doesn’t pose to humanity in this episode we cover the macro picture right now as the setting for the outlook for FS and Fintech over the next decade as well as revealing the exciting plans for levelling-up the LFP to go even further and fresher into it’s next decade. For sure it is the bes...

In this episode we discuss the super-hot and super-important topic of what Risks AI poses to humanity and society. There is perhaps not a hotter and more misunderstood topic than that of AI and the risks it poses. Many indeed fear that “it” will eliminate humans. The influential Geoffrey Hinton, co-creator of the seminal backpropagation algorithm, has been all over the media saying we need to worry and that there is 50% chance that AI outsmarts humanity and poses an existential risk. Other insid...

LLMs, of which ChatGPT is the most well-known, are perhaps the most awesome tech invention of all time. Even experienced AI folk didn’t see this coming. Most if not all of us will have used ChatGPT. However understanding of how they work is for most people either totally missing or totally misled by anthropomorphic language – thinking, learning, hallucinating, learns like a human, is like your brain and so forth. None of which are actually true in the slightest. In this super-special episode I ...

The past decade has seen the most extraordinary innovation in any business sector in the UK and thence world since the industrial revolution . An amazing outburst of creativity and independent players emerged on the oldest and stodgiest sector of all – FS. The LFP was the first, and most blue-chip podcast to cover this scene starting in 2014. This episode is like a mini-documentary that takes us one fast-forward through the development and progress of Fintech as it happened and was perceived at ...

This is a super-short extraordinary LFP outside the usual programming schedule to alert listeners to the crime of mugging folks and then getting them to transfer under duress large sums of money to the thieves bank account. This is apparently on the increase in London and is well-known in countries such as Brazil and South Africa where people may routinely take burner phones with them when going into the City. I initially learned about this risk in this Reddit thread. Many people without refle...

If you invent the world’s greatest Fintech App in your garden shed that’s impressive – but something only known to you. At which point you need to get the word out to relevant audiences. PR is an essential component in the modern world to help you refine and target that message and to get you and it into the relevant publications/podcasts et al that will reach your target clients and the market in general (think targets for next fund raise perhaps). At a more macro level, the dark side of PR is...

One major way of innovating is to move into a domain with transferable and out of the box skills/ideas/technology. This presents obvious opportunities for radical change yet naturally produces equally obvious challenges. In this episode we look at how 4 co-founders created a payments infrastructure Fintech that now connects an amazing 7.5 billion bank accounts, 6 billion cards, connect banks in 144 countries and have 620 employees with offices in 35 countries. Ani came from FS and so understood...

The Governance of FS as a whole affects all of our lives as we saw in 2008 let alone in many individual examples of FS/Fintech businesses failing and losing clients money. In our digital age virtually all of our money is digital and next to no-one sees a share certificate any more so all of our investments are digital. Thus what might appear to be a refined topic for a few is at the heart of all of our lives – money being used for roughly everything and savings equating to money saved for tomorr...

The tech world focuses heavily on the “succeed fast or fail fast” model of tech growth. In part this is as VC firms generally have limited life funds and hence cannot handle slower models but is also as the tech press loves the hype/condemn cycle implicit in this. However generally most businesses do not follow this model. Whilst rapid success comes to a few, for more it takes rather longer and for many its a slow rocky path. After all hottie OpenAI (ClosedAI?) took quite some years to make a no...

The Founder(s) is(are) at the heart of creating something new that literally never existed before. However they very much do not do this in vacuo needing to entice and hire a team below them but also, less well understood, a team around them. The surround will at some point coalesce into a formal Board (as opposed to a pro forma Board for Day0 – and for many days after – NewCos). In this episode experienced NED/Advisor/Mentor/Angel Nic Lenz and I discuss experience in this field with particular...

As always there is a fascinating phenomenon when the globalised world of tech meets the localised worlds of custom, people, rules and regulations. As recently as LFP243 we dived in to the world of tech as a whole in Berlin and today we dive into Fintech in France. Needless to say France is a massive market, well banked and a real venue for Fintech. That having been said there are, as always, some downsides. In this episode we have a fascinating historical, philosophical and very practical conver...

In this episode we take the opportunity to talk to one of the most credit risk experienced men in Fintech who has ranged from a dozen years at seminal Capital One through managing Barclay’s £40 bn portfolio, being CRO at Funding Circle to now founding his own Fintech to mechanise further short term SME liquidity financing, Jerome’s stats are that banks automate roughly 5% of this type of lending whereas he believes the vast majority to be automatable. We discuss what credit risk is in the age o...

This 2024 New Year Special forms the sixth and final in a series of six (there will be no more) about how technology – and in this episode way wider forces – are changing us directly for the better (read huge software upgrades) in order to overcome, in a velvet revolution, empowered tyrants. I said in last years 2023 New Year Special that “It is by far the most ambitious, empowering and positive of all suggesting that we use the insanity as a spur in our sides to seek to flee Plato’s cave, esca...