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Every time I see a fintech announce they are applying for a charter, I wonder ‘do you really want to be a bank?’ 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.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) has been taking the world by storm.

One of our core values here at 11:FS is ‘everything on purpose and with purpose’. We even have a porpoise sticker (the puns keep coming) to celebrate it. It is what enables us to deliver fast, without waste and with relentless focus on outcomes. That and a kick-ass team. They often go together.

For this edition of After Dark, the live recording of our Fintech Insider podcast, we went for something a little bit different. Presenting After Dark: Starting from scratch, the short story... Check out the video here.

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.

In this week’s news show we had representation from both sides of the Atlantic as Nina Mohanty, Doug Bobenhouse and Valentina Kristensen joined new host Ross Gallagher in his first rodeo in the hosting seat, and Simon Taylor to discuss the week’s biggest stories. Listen here for the episode in full, stream it below or read on for additional insights.

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.

Many marketers have a story of a boss or board that wanted all the benefits of a strong brand, without the investment, hassle or commitment of having to build one. 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.

So. Let’s talk about DAO, baby.

AML is the world’s most ineffective policy experiment. Imagine if you have a car that didn’t work 99.9% of the time. That would be annoying right? 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.

SMBs are the lifeblood of most economies. In the UK alone they make up 99.9% of all private sector businesses and employ 60% of all private sector workers. Yet they are chronically underserved by incumbent financial institutions (FIs) across all segments.

Businesses are slowly awakening to the idea that it's time to consider new sources of growth when it comes to securing their futures. They’ve realised that, sometimes, designing the most engaging customer value propositions requires leaning on the brand strength of other players outside of your domain.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is one of the hottest trends in fintech. The concept of 0% finance has been around for decades, but it’s caught fire in the last 3 years with new market entrants like Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna transforming how this works for consumers in an e-commerce setting. 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.

A Black-owned bank is defined as one in which at least 50% of voting shares are owned by African-Americans. They’re a dwindling force in the States today.

Richard Brown, CTO at R3, says that blockchain allows us to, for the first time, build systems and technologies that run between different organisations that don’t trust each other and bring them to consensus. This means potentially significant savings for financial services, especially in file reconciliation and manual activity. For blockchain to succeed in finance, multiple firms must work together, and Corda is helping to do just that.