Articles

1st February was Time to Talk Day, a day dedicated to mental health awareness, and opening up the conversation around it in the aim of removing the stigma. The mantra behind the day is that mental health affects us all and it’s time to talk about it.

There’s a lot of recession talk at the moment. Are we entering the next recession? Are we already in it? We all remember the 2008 financial crisis, and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, and all the financial trouble they caused.

A banker who shall remain anonymous has penned this exclusive undercover piece, giving us the insider’s view on why they believe Open Banking APIs may be stifling rather than driving competition in UK Banking. Writing under the pseudonym “The Stigcumbent” to protect their identity, they want to expose the friction created by Open Banking, and the potential failure to create competition as a result. Read on for more…

From an idea to a live show in a few days. We’re looking to bring the financial services, fintech and wider community together while we’re all so far apart.

Today marks the first of our brand new mini-series in collaboration with Tech Nation. We’re launching One Fintech Nation, a series looking beyond London and uniting the fintech kingdom. For too long the UK fintech scene has been viewed (perhaps unfairly) as very London-specific, when it extends beyond London’s borders and to all the countries that make up the United Kingdom.In our podcast we pop the London fintech bubble and show you the groundbreaking work being done across the nation. You can/should/need/have to listen to it here.

I speak to a lot of banks and I get asked the same question: “How do I test my product ideas?” The secret is understanding how your customers measure value and align your proposition to their definition of success. However, the temptation for a lot of corporate innovation teams is to jump straight into product design which ultimately slows you down and sends you in the wrong direction. To set off in the right direction and accelerate to market you need to return the customer Job. Jobs To Be Done is a technique being used by some of the most innovative digital brands in the world.

Henry Ford owned the plants that manufactured rubber, glass, and steel to build the Ford Model T. Now car companies have a network of specialist suppliers of glass, rubber, and other key parts. These suppliers are better at building glass or rubber than the car companies themselves. You know that Henry Ford’s business model is no longer viable; that’s why you subcontract for multiple pain points in the industry. Why focus on developing all your own security when you can outsource it to specialists?

Jobs to be done (JTBD). It’s an interesting phrase. Pithy, agile-sounding, and adaptive. It’s about bringing humanity to an industry that sometimes forgets about it.I spoke to Ryan Garner, Innovation and Insight lead at 11:FS about what it means to introduce jobs to be done to the fintech space. And how being human is core to delivering a meaningful product. Ryan knows the only way for fintech to succeed is to understand people.

Open Banking turned one on Sunday, but why has no-one made a big deal about it despite all the potential?

Sports people make better business people. There, I said it. I’ve said it before so you shouldn't be too surprised at this point but I honestly believe in this statement.

Until the wider acceptance of Bill James ‘Sabremetrics’, immortalised in ‘Moneyball’ by Michael Lewis in his book from 2003, the rating of Major League Baseball (‘MLB’) players was determined by subjective talent scouts and a few basic statistics. James first defined Sabremetrics as ‘the search for objective knowledge about baseball’ in 1980. But it took over 20 years for Sabremetrics to be accepted as a powerful tool in rating players and understanding their impact on the financial side of baseball. What in the world does this have to do with understanding investing? Like baseball and Sabremetrics, technology has enabled a new breed of asset manager to connect in a more meaningful way with the end investor.

Monzo have become the world’s first smart bank as they have integrated If This, Then That (IFTTT) into their banking technology, which launches today. IFTTT has nearly all internet based services linked into it, from social media to slack bots and smart home devices to Google calendars, but up until now, no financial services.

I’ve read an awful lot of research reports in my professional life. I also studied History at university and if that doesn’t set you up with the ability to detect sense from nonsense when it comes to research, I don’t know what will. More recently, I’ve written a lot of market research reports and have every intention of writing more in the future. But I want my next set of research outputs to be different. So I turned to Twitter, that great hotbed of opinion, to conduct a survey (with many methodological holes) to find out what people’s biggest bugbears are with most of the content out there today.

I love the Showtime drama series Billions. It gets two big thumbs up from me and I highly recommend binge-watching the series. You'll thank me later.I recently finished season 3 of the program and I actually burst out laughing during the beginning of the show. Real-life celebrities and billionaires are a constant staple of the series. Past guests have included Mark Cuban, Maria Sharapova, and even my beloved Metallica. But what made me chuckle was the brief appearance of Sara Blakely playing, well, herself.And why not? She's a self-made billionaire and founder of Spanx as I detailed in my first blog post on the commonalities between the Spanx product and the digitization of financial services. Seeing her pop up on my screen while watching the season finale prompted me to sit down and write part 2 of this blog post.

11:FS announced today that Microsoft has become a strategic partner over the forthcoming months across our Fintech Insider podcasts. Microsoft wants to be an integral part of tackling some of the biggest challenges in financial services and collaborate on topics of interest to the industry audience.