How are banks and fintechs planning for a digital future.

Word soup. That's the jargon used to communicate the story and values of a business. It's what we tell our clients to actively pay attention to and what to avoid when working together to develop new disruptive propositions to take to market. This is taken from our Unfiltered newsletter. Subscribe now for a no BS, uncensored analysis of fintech news and hot topics delivered to your inbox each fortnight.

FinTech Insider takes a field trip to Monzo to chat to Jonas Huckestein (Co-Founder/CTO), Leah Templeman (Head of Operations), and Hugo Cornejo (Head of Design). They talk about their community-based, collaborative work model, what their full banking licence will bring, and how they plan to win over a billion customers.

In this guest blog, Rafael Plantier - country manager for the UK and Ireland at Tink, discusses the results of their latest research into the status of European bank's APIs, two months on from the PSD2 deadline.

When seventeen self-professed ‘organisation anarchists’ sat down one day in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, they probably didn’t realise the extent to which their words would impact the world. A sea change in management thinking, scores of new words added to the global lexicon and widespread shunning of old methodologies – the Agile Manifesto was the early trumpet call which heralded the phenomenal rise of global tech giants. This is taken from our Unfiltered newsletter. Subscribe now for a no BS, uncensored analysis of fintech news and hot topics delivered to your inbox each fortnight.

2017 is drawing to a close, it’s been an amazing year for fintech and banking, there’s been so many changes, new companies, products, services and innovation across the industry. For a full rundown of the best (and worst) stories from 2017, listen to our After Dark Christmas Special where we recap the whole year. However, as 2018 is fast approaching, we’re looking ahead and getting some predictions in for the next year. We asked the 11:FS co-founders and team and our Fintech Insider News community what they thought would be the big themes of 2018. The biggest topics were as follows:

After a decade of intense innovation, the mood across global financial services has turned sharply. Optimism has given way to fear and long-term ambition has been shelved for short-term survival.

At one of our Truly Digital After Dark events, Anne Boden said “if you call yourself digital, you’re not digital”.

With 11:FS Pulse you can.

There is a popular belief that you have to 'make it real' as quickly as possible – “come on, just f*****g build the thing - it's the only way to learn!”. In many scenarios this belief is a dangerous myth, and here's why...

After a busy year in crypto, 11:FS co-founder Simon Taylor checks in on his 2019 predictions to see what he got right and what he missed.

We’re all busier than ever. Not even the most efficient human can cope with the trials we all face and the tasks we all have to do on a daily basis. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. This is taken from our Unfiltered newsletter. Subscribe now for a no BS, uncensored analysis of fintech news and hot topics delivered to your inbox each fortnight.

Do you remember when you first saw a newspaper app on an iPad? It was as though a physical newspaper had been trapped under the black glass. There was even a page turning animation that you probably showed your friends. It was magical. It was digitised news. Ditto for buying albums on iTunes and ordering a traditional taxi; amazing experiences, but we just took what had come before and translated it directly to the new medium.

Africa is the most worthy market for mainstream adoption of decentralised finance. Why? I could go on and on about the underbanked, underserved populations and fragmented remittance ecosystem - while that’s all valid, the biggest pain point in my mind is currency devaluation. Volatile currencies make it difficult for Africans’ savings to hold their value. Solving for currency devaluation will provide the beachhead for the adoption of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) across Africa.

The last episode of Under The Hood, the podcast series with 11:FS that took a deep dive into the banking infrastructure that is disrupting traditional banking models and shaking up the system, has been released. And looking back, I realise how many great conversations we’ve had.

There’s a lot going on right now on personal, business and industry levels. But as I sit here in my home office over the last month talking to senior people in financial services, fintech founders and project teams all over the world, one thing keeps returning to me: “See, we didn’t need more strategy”.