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While FinTech folk salivate – and the big banks bloviate – about PSD2 and the open banking reforms coming our way in 2018, we wondered whether those outside of this bubble will actually notice? What does PSD2 actually mean for customers?

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.

Throughout history, humans have found direction from statements of intent that suggest 'better' ways of living.

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

Nothing’s worse than not having any options, but having too many can be just as bad.

We now live in a world where almost anyone can build and launch innovative, regulated financial products as easily as they can create a Shopify page - that’s the magic of Banking as a Service (BaaS).

As 11:FS wraps up its 5th year in business, we can’t help but think about what the next 5 will look like. And our ambitions are big. It’s only just on the right side of scary.

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.

As we roll into 2018 thoughts inevitably turn to the big themes that we might expect (and hope) to see for user experience in the financial services industry this year.

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.

Good working culture is impossible without motivation. Therefore, it is essential to follow a model of organisation design that supports the conditions in which motivation can be maximised.

Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, 11:FS Chief of Staff creates #LedaWrites. This week she turns her attention to planning for the future, accountability and caring about everything.

At 11:FS, we build digital financial services, primarily banks. ‘Bank’ is a very broad term, of course, and our focus on client needs and ‘Jobs To Be Done’ approach (“People don’t want a mortgage, they want to buy a house”), means that we rarely set out to build a pure bank.

Each week, Leda Glyptis, CEO of 11:FS Foundry, creates #LedaWrites. This week she ponders the difference between stress, and pressure - and the importance of acknowledging that stress without indulging it.

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.