Episodes

In this Xmas special we zoom out from Fintech to Tech as a whole in one of Europe’s coolest capitals – Berlin. Ivan is a great person to guide us through the scene having spent many years in the Ur-tech hub of San Francisco/Silicon Valley. This also means that he understands both the outsiders perspective on Berlin tech as well as now an experienced and well informed insider. Ivan honestly lays out both the highs and the lows of being in Tech in Berlin – the good news and the challenges and the...

Saudi Arabia is a country that increasingly confounds stereotypes and expectations – an example being a YouTuber who has visited every country in the world choosing it for his honeymoon. At the same time it has undergone a phenomenal journey literally in a lifetime from a very low economic standard of living to super-high. As a result, like China, it shares the “relatively blank canvas from which to start Finteching” but equally has it’s own unique issues notably eg in a country with centuries o...

Why buy alternative assets? Well in extremis what else would you buy?

Back in the 70s getting mortgages took months – there was a mortgage queue (&before techies get over-excited about how “bad” this was it was one of the factors restraining insane bull markets in residential property). Fast forward and the median mortgage in the UK is granted in 19 business days which is still a long time to wait given the stresses associated with the UK legal structure of buying a house. MPowered Mortgages, a regulated mortgage lender in the UK, have reduced this to a median of ...

So rapid is the rate of change in banking and the nature of and control of money right now that today we set a record and have a returning guests a mere 6 months later. Mario (YouTube Channel) first joined us in Feb22 for the gargantuan LFP197 “Money in the 21stC: Ballooning Printing of Fiat/QE/”MMT”/Govt Debt, CBDCs, Crypto, Dedollarisation, Hyperinflation, Gold” and more recently in Feb23 for LFP220 “Has A Century Of The Federal Reserve and 50 Years Off The Gold Standard Directly Led To Moneta...

In this episode we dive not just into the world of Islamic Finance and Fintech but the practical lessons we can learn from the world’s oldest “ethical investment” tradition. In particular in an ever-changing world there is always the need to extend and interpret any given set of “ethical finance” guidelines for new circumstances. The Islamic world has had vastly longer to get to grips with managing this confluence of principle and practice in a Heraclitean world of constant change. In LFP223 we...

The next in our geographic coverage series on global Fintech past present and future with a special bonus of a taste of Fintech in Asia as Michael, a former Fintech founder himself turned VC at Runa Capital had just returned from a three week trip all around the region. Like all regions the US has its peculiarities – not least of which the structure of State and Federal regulation which depending on your vertical can be – as it were – more federal or more confederal in flavour. As in many circs...

Is the structure of regulation in need of refactoring? Do we have a kind of Reg Debt situation – cf Tech Debt – where organic growth has led to complexity, inefficiency and indeed regulations stretched beyond their original purpose? In this episode Alistair and I discuss some specific examples that would indicate that after as much as a decade of evolution it is perhaps time for a rethink or a refactoring of the reg base. Integrated Finance was founded when the co-founders found challenges in ...

The latest in the LFP’s coverage of Fintech in geographical regions and this fascinating balance between the bottom-up and the top-down, between localisation and globalisation of Fintech. As always when covering vast territories containing many nations, “regions” contain widely differing conditions, not least of which background of FS structure and infrastructure in the first place. Said, a partner at Global Ventures, is well-placed to give us a tour d’horizon as not just is his day job being ...

The majority of successful exits for companies are via trade sale (not that given the media hype you’d necessarily imagine it was anything but IPOs). Furthermore the percentage of companies that list on an exchange is falling meaning, that along with the economic circumstances, private companies and remaining in the unlisted space is becoming ever more important. In this episode we dive into the whole soup-to-nuts process of how to trade sell oneself, what the stages are, what the obstacles and...

It is a well-known trope that although failure is a challenge rapid success, though more desirable lol, can be too. In this episode we dive into the fascinating Case Study of Ecospend who went from startup to trade sale to world open-banking payments leaders Trustly in five years. Along the way they beat off incumbent competition for one of the UK’s largest accounts that of HSBCs self-assessment payments. Which as you might imagine amounts to quite a few transactions. In this show James Hickman...

In this episode we discuss VC early stage investment and whether there is a “VC funding winter” as some have called it or whether just a correction. How should early stage founders who want to raise funds maximise their chances of doing so? Few VCs go down to early stage investing but what factors do they look for? Funding is harder to come by right now but it’s still there. What themes and approaches help? Is it indeed a good rather than a bad time to create a startup? Dr Ric Schaefer is a Par...

Fintech is a Big Thing. India is a vast sub-continent. Naveen Bindal, the co–founder of Enkash which is India‘s largest spend management Fintech, joins us to discuss Fintech in India which was one of the first movers in Fintech worldwide and is now by some measures the world’s third largest Fintech marketplace. Naveen started his career some 23 years ago as a developer in a credit card company working on payment processing and with banks. Having been involved in the Indian FinTech space for so...

There is a real art to how a founder manages his companies equity. If he gives it, or its derivative, share options, away too fast for too little value – whether funding or staff – he will be giving away his creation on the cheap and losing control fast. Vice versa hoarding it to himself will produce inadequate funding and not top-notch senior staff. If this is the spectrum then there is in addition a whole dimension of the terms and conditions over equity schemes. There are plenty of hidden ele...

AI/ML has been around for a long time but recently hit the headlines with ChatGPT which has broken every tech record in the book for a piece of tech that attracts users faster than any other tech ever. If Generative AI is the hot topic of the day though what is happening behind the scenes with more prosaic Fintech use cases. Tristan who is CEO of commodity price predictors and now Insurtech ChAI first joined us in 2016 for an an overview of AI/ML and updated us more recently in 2019 to talk abou...

Financial Services is all about Finance which is all about money. However almost all FS employees just accept “money” as a thing in the same way they accept gravity. Which is an odd thing if you think about it. Most of the time this wouldn’t matter but at turning points such as we are at now if can be disastrous, What money is and the regimes around it have varied widely over time and space. However it is true to say that Central Banks are a total exception – indeed the ne plus ultra of Big Stat...

Increasing automation is what the tech revolution is about – by definition. In this episode we dive into this topic starting at the highest levels – Government intelligence community quality tech at GCHQ (where Jeremy and his four co-founders had been long-term employees) and the immense value of technology transfer between state and private sectors. We then move through some of the more challenging questions of definition of terms (super-relevant for computers and their usage by business) and t...

This 2023 New Year Special forms the fifth is a series of five about how technology is changing us directly and indirectly by empowering tyrants. 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, escape the Matrix and speed up our path to awakening in search of love, light and healing. Sound like a cool topic, a worthy goal to you? It has five chapters: Metapolitical Awakening Psychological...

So yet another fresh topic we haven’t covered so far

Ricardo is a Brazilian serial entrepreneur who joins us in this show to give us an overview of the key features of Fintech in Central/Southern (aka Latin) America. The region includes the worlds highest valued neo-bank which has reached an astonishing 65 million client base in less than a decade – most of whom never had a bank account before, so amazing things are happening down there.Which are the major players out of the nigh on three dozen countries? What are the trends. What historical and g...

What actually is due diligence? How does it work and how should you if you find yourselves approaching one best prepare for it? Barr Blanton CEO of Crosslake Technologies, whose strapline is “private equity and management teams trusted advisor for technology”, and half of whose business is doing due dil joins us to outline what due diligence is and how to handle it best for both buyer and seller (or in the case of VC raises when raising). Crosslake advise 500 Private Equity firms worldwide and h...

All sane Fintechs will have a security system to try and keep out as many attacks and fraudulent would be clients. However the nature of the attacks and frauds is getting ever-more hardcore. As Martin says in the show back in the day to rob a bank you would have to take significant personal risk when getting into and out of a bank with your shotgun and a high risk of capture by the authorities. These days the risk:return is way lower (and one reason for much higher levels of fraud) as one can si...

Swiss Kickstart Innovation are highly active in enabling deals between Fintechs and incumbent FS – when we recorded the podcast for example they had facilitated an extraordinary 300 negotiations in the prior 10 days. As we haven’t dived for many years into the whole challenge of young Fintechs managing to close deals with incumbents whose heartbeat, whose pace of change is radically different from the newcomers, it is rather overdue a visit? What has empirical evidence found in the meantime? Aft...

Payments orchestration is all the rage. But what is it, and amidst all the hype is it all it’s cracked up to be? Good questions and who better to ask than serial entrepreneur Kristian who founded Cellpoint Digital back in 2007 to do precisely what became known today as payments orchestration and indeed their website says they are the global leader in it. Thus Cellpoint have the claim to not only be the first to do orchestration but to do it before it existed and to chart the convergence and conf...