Customer research, user testing and feedback loops for FS products.

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.