Articles

I used to hate when my parents came into high school for the annual speech from my teachers that I should be trying a lot harder. Unlike my report cards at school, I think the 11:FS end of year report would read pretty damn well as every single person that has worked for 11:FS couldn’t have done more to make it a success over the last year.

In her latest column for Forbes, 11:FS Head of Research Sarah Kocianski analyses Chime's recent outages and challengers' reliance on third-party processors.

Fintech Connect 2020 is just around the corner! It’s taking place online from the 30th November to the 4th December, with 8,000 attendees and more than 200 speakers already confirmed.

A guest post by Jessica Holzbach, Head of Customer Relations at Penta CRM is often misconstrued or just written off as email marketing. As such, startups often forget to factor in true customer retention management into their marketing strategies, until they have too many customers that their current methods are not scalable.

With the industry evolving rapidly around us, there’s little room for anyone who isn’t able to change at pace. A six month old greenfield codebase will be brown before you know it. You must be able to move quickly.

Taste your product, be big and fast, invest in your own teams and partner with Snoop Dogg. Chief Commercial Officer of Klarna, Michael Rouse has more than a few nuggets of wisdom to share.

From dreams of running a five-star hotel to the reality of running a five-star bank, Ashok Vaswani, the CEO of Barclays UK, speaks with Simon Taylor about culture, digital transformation challenges and opportunities, front line staff empowerment and how Simon might be able to buy a Lamborghini in the future.

Lesley-Anne Vaughan, Director of MiLA Consulting and Co-Creator of M-PESA, Vodafone’s famed mobile money transfer service, has been dedicated to mobile money and mobile financial services in emerging markets since 2005. Here, she shares how M-PESA transformed from a microfinance product to a revolutionary service that’s changed Kenya’s infrastructure, increased financial inclusion, and earned the majority of the market for mobile money transfers.

Africa is a vast continent, with huge distances between cities, large populations, and availability of financial services varying by country. Western tech startups and businesses often think of Africa as a complex and problematic place to launch products because of the lack of infrastructure – but that’s where the opportunity lies. Here are some great examples of innovation coming out of Africa that FinTech players globally should pay attention to.

This post appeared first in The Times and Raconteur in the UK in June 2016. Until the financial crisis banks had enjoyed decades of growth unencumbered by the disruption seen in the newspaper, telecommunications and music industries. During the good years banks’ profits soared and, while they embraced customer-facing internet and mobile apps, the foundations, processes and technology on which banks are built, despite billions spent on technology, would look familiar to those who worked there in the 1970s. UK banks now face the perfect storm of significant technological advancements plus a regulator and government that want to foster innovation, and an ever-growing disillusionment of banking customers to banks’ offerings.

When it comes to managing bills and expenses, there’s a variety of products available on the market. Some are not amazing, others are good, but there is still a gap for an offering tailored to student needs.

It may not have escaped your attention that the British Public voted to leave the EU. Although in the aftermath it’s still unclear quite what that actually means, this morning bank shares have taken a significant hit with Lloyds off 8%, Barclays 10% and RBS down 15% leading the LSE to halt trading in those stocks. There are a number of theories about what happens next. Are people concerned about retail banking operations, corporate banking, investment banking or all of the above? Here are some ideas.

The UK banking battlefield has never been more competitive. Customers expect financial apps that are personalised, seamless, and that genuinely make a difference — and they compare them not just to other banks, but to the best digital experiences in any industry. The margin for mediocrity is gone.

Antony Jenkins, former CEO of Barclays, has spent 35 years working in large financial services institutions. He says that it struck him that, although there’s a lot of technology in banks, it doesn’t help much when it comes to improving the customer experience or lowering costs, and it hasn’t improved the reputation of banks within society. He founded 10x to create a new banking experience — one that is more diverse, open, and fair. In episode 229 of FinTech Insider, he talks to us about his new company, the future of banking, and the transition from running one of the biggest banks in the world to founding a startup.

Spending billions on digital transformation – and bragging about it – seems to be the only game in town for large incumbent banks. But this spending hasn’t paid off, and financial institutions continue to battle a heavy fixed-cost base. You know digital transformation is critical, so how do you convince an incumbent bank’s CFO and CxOs that digital transformation doesn’t have to cost billions or take decades?