As financial services continues to ride the digital transformation wave, there is a big problem emerging: recruiting the tech talent required to achieve the scale of change needed.
This article was originally published in February 2021. In light of a looming cost-of-living crisis, soaring inflation and spiralling interest rates, we feel it’s more relevant now than ever. So, after a bit of tinkering, we’ve republished it. Enjoy.
While I was COO at Revolut, Vlad Yatsenko - the company’s Co-Founder & CTO - commented a number of times about how opportunity cost of time is typically the biggest cost in a scaling company, and I’ve come to realise this is more and more true.
If I’d told you six months ago that you could guarantee an affordable electricity supply for your home, you wouldn’t have cared.
One of the dirty secrets of the fintech and banking community is that everyone thinks that everyone else understands how it all works and that they’re the only one who doesn’t really get it.
The digital banking scene in Southeast Asia is hot right now. Over the past two years, it’s experienced some rapid changes. Changing regulations have triggered a mass of new players entering the market.
There’s a lot of positivity, creativity and excitement within game developer communities. People are flocking to games for entertainment and there have never been more tools to create them.
Working with agencies can sometimes feel like you spend weeks or even months covering ground that you already know before you start seeing value.
If you’re building a fintech or adding financial services to an existing platform, there’s no doubt that the concept of embedded finance with white-label solutions has passed you by.
Price walking [common in the insurance industry] a form of price discrimination whereby existing customers, especially long-standing customers, incur a loyalty penalty over new customers. 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.
James Safford is a name you might not be familiar with from the 11:FS team. He’s starred in a couple of our shows with brilliant insights on what’s going on in the fintech space. James is a Market Research Analyst working on the 11:FS Pulse platform delivering insights into customer journeys globally. I took a moment to sit down with James and talk to him about how things differ working in fintech compared to publishing, and why he moved into the space after deciding against a lifelong dream.
This past weekend an estimated 177m people tuned in as Matthew Stafford’s (strong surname BTW) LA Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals at Super Bowl LVII.
The 11:FS research team recently finalised the first part of a major piece of work examining the services available to US Small to Medium-sized businesses. Here’s some of what we discovered.
Providing the best service to have the largest market share. That’s what banks want to be and want to have. And for a very long time they did.

We look back to a conversation David Brear had with a panel of expert guests to discuss the future of fintech in Australia.

David M. Brear is joined by financial services veteran, Ashok Vaswani, to discuss how he draws on his experience going forward and why he continues to put learning first.

In this second episode on our deep dive into the creator economy in the US, David Barton-Grimley and is joined by not one, but two fantastic guests, the Co-CEOs of Karat Financial to discuss how financial services can better understand creators and how financial education is the key.

Ross Gallagher is joined by some great guests to talk about how fintech and financial services are meeting the needs of Gens Alpha and Beta, and how they are adapting to the needs of tomorrow's wealth makers.

David M. Brear, CEO at 11:FS, is joined by our very own CTO Ewan Silver for a fireside chat to unpick what we mean when we say the services have fallen out of financial services.

In this classic Focus episode, David M. Brear is joined by some great guests, from Visa and Capway, to really dig into the keys to successful financial inclusion in America.

David Barton-Grimley is joined by some great guests to unpack the six characteristics of digital commercial banking; real-time, standardised, automated, embedded, contextual, and extendable. We’ll explore what they are and how they can (or can’t) support a more efficient, reliable, and secure industry.

11:FS CEO David M. Brear and Visa's Sophie Schulman are joined by some great guests to look at how fintech can support and shape the US creator economy.

David Brear is joined by a panel of experts from Cleo, Feedzai and Starling Bank to look at how financial services need to adapt to the changes brought by AI, where it can have the most influence and where the human touch is still needed.

Kate Moody is joined by some great guests, from 11:FS, ClearEstate, and PensionBee, to look at the financial services aimed at customers over 60.

PayPal launches stablecoin, Apple announces $10 billion in deposits, and Drake launches Shopify mansion – Kate Moody and Ross Gallagher are joined by some great guests, from Fiat Republic and Knot API, to talk about the most interesting stories in financial services over the last 7 days.

David M. Brear is joined by some great guests from Visa, Chipper Cash, and DJAMO, to discuss the evolution and further potential of mobile money in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Benjamin Ensor is joined by some great guests, from 11:FS, Innovate Finance, and TwentyOne to talk about the biggest lessons for financial services in the first half of 2023.

Kate Moody is joined by some great guests, from 11:FS, Nationwide, and Plum, to discuss how banks and fintechs can shape how customers manager their finances.

Benjamin Ensor is joined by some great guests, from Atom Bank, Coastal Community Bank, and Vexi to talk about the value of trust to financial services.

11:FS CEO David M. Brear takes to the lightboard to give us the full run-down, with examples of companies that are leading the way.
Just what is going on with Buy Now, Pay Later right now?

There are one billion people globally who can't prove their identity. That's a big problem for accessing financial services.
It's not just a buzzword.

The UK banking battlefield has never been more competitive. Customers expectfinancial apps that are personalised, seamless, and that genuinely make a differenc...


The UK banking battlefield has never been more competitive. Customers expectfinancial apps that are personalised, seamless, and that genuinely make a differenc...

