Europe

Since we launched the first Pulse awards, a lot has changed.

The battle for commuters’ attention has been heating up. On the London Underground, it feels like every other ad is trying to push the latest fintech or challenger bank to the city’s tired travellers.

Banking for SMEs has been ineffective for a long time, with products that kept owners working on admin rather than growth. It’s time for something new.

Under Friday night lights and in appalling conditions of driving wind and rain, the mighty 11:FC overcame all odds to bring home a 2-1 victory over office neighbours, Yieldify FC.

Former Apple and BCG Digital Ventures Head of Talent will manage 11:FS team to scale the business as it engages in new projects, with new clients and across new geographies.

For the first time in years, notions of data privacy, consent and security are mainstream. It’s a sudden backlash to an issue that infosec experts have been warning us about for even longer.

When the lights went out we got some of the brightest in the industry to shine a spotlight on Open Finance for our third virtual After Dark, a live recording of our award winning Fintech Insider podcast.

The wait was finally over. Game day arrived. The Big One. 11:FS vs Monzo, in 11:FC’s first professional 11-a-side fixture. Nerves were jangling in 11:FC HQ in the lead up the game. Captain Petrit Berisha led his men in extensive warm ups, team talks, tactics and formations all day, to get the team both mentally and physically ready for the challenge that awaited them.

A banker who shall remain anonymous has penned this exclusive undercover piece, giving us the insider’s view on why they believe Open Banking APIs may be stifling rather than driving competition in UK Banking. Writing under the pseudonym “The Stigcumbent” to protect their identity, they want to expose the friction created by Open Banking, and the potential failure to create competition as a result. Read on for more…

From an idea to a live show in a few days. We’re looking to bring the financial services, fintech and wider community together while we’re all so far apart.

Today marks the first of our brand new mini-series in collaboration with Tech Nation. We’re launching One Fintech Nation, a series looking beyond London and uniting the fintech kingdom. For too long the UK fintech scene has been viewed (perhaps unfairly) as very London-specific, when it extends beyond London’s borders and to all the countries that make up the United Kingdom.In our podcast we pop the London fintech bubble and show you the groundbreaking work being done across the nation. You can/should/need/have to listen to it here.

Until the wider acceptance of Bill James ‘Sabremetrics’, immortalised in ‘Moneyball’ by Michael Lewis in his book from 2003, the rating of Major League Baseball (‘MLB’) players was determined by subjective talent scouts and a few basic statistics. James first defined Sabremetrics as ‘the search for objective knowledge about baseball’ in 1980. But it took over 20 years for Sabremetrics to be accepted as a powerful tool in rating players and understanding their impact on the financial side of baseball. What in the world does this have to do with understanding investing? Like baseball and Sabremetrics, technology has enabled a new breed of asset manager to connect in a more meaningful way with the end investor.

Monzo have become the world’s first smart bank as they have integrated If This, Then That (IFTTT) into their banking technology, which launches today. IFTTT has nearly all internet based services linked into it, from social media to slack bots and smart home devices to Google calendars, but up until now, no financial services.

This crazy time of being locked away has got me reflecting on how lucky we are to be digitally connected and how I've seen this community in action.

Sam Frampton has had an incredibly successful experience during his time as an 11:FS intern. He created and project managed our Beginner’s Guide to Open Banking that you can find here. In addition to this he’s helped provide strong insightful data into our Fintech Insiders website, a forum for fintech you can find here. Using that data he also created a daily newsletter that recaps the latest in fintech news, sign up and you’ll get an insight into just some of the work our 11:FS interns do. Our interns get to create and effect meaningful change in the company. If you can prove value and show why something needs to be done differently, we’ll do it. That’s part of what it means to be at 11:FS.