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

It’s 2022! And we’ve got a sneaking suspicion this year is gonna be one to remember.

Arguably the biggest story right now is the announcement of Stripe Capital’s new end-to-end lending API for platforms to offer financing options to their SMB customers. (Simon Taylor wrote a great piece on this at the weekend.) 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.

The fourth episode of our brand-new video series, Decoding: Banking as a Service, is here! If you missed it (or any of the others) catch up here. Here’s a rundown of this episode if you prefer reading to watching 📖

Hopefully, by now you’ve had a chance to digest some, if not all, of our inclusive design series.

This is the final instalment of a 6 part series that explores the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) for US SMBs that we identified in our recent research. Each blog post dives into one of the jobs and how we examined it with a JTBD canvas. If you missed the first post that explains JTBD and the canvas, check it out before reading this.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a theory. Its main aim is to explain why customers start - and stop - using different products and services in the market. Stripped down to the essentials, it’s a fairly straightforward concept first introduced by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen that can be adapted into a useful tool for product development.

This is the third instalment of a 6 part series that explores the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) for US SMBs that we identified in our recent research. Each blog post explores one of the jobs and how we examined it with a JTBD canvas. If you missed the first post that explains JTBD and the canvas, check it out before reading this.

David M. Brear interviewed Jonathan Larsen, CIO, Ping An and CEO of their Global Voyager Fund, a $1bn investment fund, specifically for fintech. He tells David all about the fund and the innovations in fintech coming from China and making a huge impact worldwide.

Despite the astronomical price-tag and highly breakable look of early foldable phones, we can confidently predict a future of interesting new design challenges thanks to flexible screens.

Sharing our stories, our challenges, and the things that truly matter to us. Today we talk to Clouston Mahon who is a UX lead in the 11:FS Pulse team to discuss what makes a great user experience, who is doing it well and looking outside of financial services for inspiration.

In the first part of this series I introduced the story of Frederic Tudor, the American Ice-Block King; and discussed lessons learned from his then new product offering as it relates to blockchain technology. Tudor was able to successfully corner the ice-block shipping market and eventually was shipping blocks of ice to as far away as Calcutta from his home in Boston.

How can community banks remain competitive as large financial institutions gobble up more and more of the market?

How successful have government loan schemes in the UK and US been so far and what’s next?

There’s been no shortage of attention paid to the emergence of fintech in the Middle East recently. In fact, we wrote about the ‘perfect storm’ that was brewing in the region and recently gave an overview of the digital challengers emerging to meet these needs.

We’ve sifted through the data to find out what 11:FS Pulse users have been loving and where their focus has been for the last 12 months.