Global

Over the past eight years, as a fintech founder who happens to be gay, I’ve met with 100+ corporate and institutional investors around the world.

Gary Turner is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Xero, which Forbes described as the “World’s Most Innovative Growth Company.” Xero provides small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs or SMEs) with ‘beautiful’ online accounting software. Gary helped take Xero from a 3-person startup to a company that will have £150 million in revenue this year.

How do we stay ahead of fraud and financial crime without compromising the speed, ease, and trust that make instant payments so compelling? In this article, Mastercard's Bryan Sharkey explores it all.

When people start explaining how technology can be used to modernise financial services their language instantly becomes fraught with acronyms, buzzwords, and idioms that can make little sense to those both inside, and especially, outside the industry.We have a hunch sometimes people do this to appear smart but we need to do more research!

Sam Maule, Director of Digital & Fintech at NTT DATA Americas, talks to us about how a kid from Detroit became a fintech leader, his new podcast, femtech, and Silicon Valley’s rude awakening.

Goldman Sachs broke the fintechnet this week when it launched its developer portal, intentionally allowing companies to ‘embed finance’ within their organisation using their Banking as a Service (BaaS) offering. Hari Moorthy, Goldman’s Global Head of Transaction Banking, referred to it as “the financial cloud for corporates.” Cue a flurry of emails inside every large bank from CEOs wondering how seriously they should take this. Take it seriously. Take it very seriously.

Let’s start by calling Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) what it is - debt. Debt, of course, has many faces. But ‘credit, pay in instalments, pay nothing today, etc.’ are all just debt. 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.

Over the past twelve months, we’ve been seriously busy here at 11:FS. Now we’re announcing arguably the most exciting project we’ve ever taken on.

That’s what 11:FS bank building guru Jason hears when he tells people that he’s just spent the last two years building a new digital bank, and they’re right!

The Pulse team spends their time trawling through the world of banks and fintech apps, sorting the good from the bad so you don’t have to.

In this blog post Simon Taylor explores the concept of a Central Bank Digital Currency and why you would want a DLT (or “Blockchain”) like architecture for such a system.

If you missed Part 1 of this 2 part piece then you can catch it here and catch up with the rest of the class: BaaP (Banking as a Platform) Part 1 – Why haven’t we seen a banking platform play?

The landscape for fintech and banking is evolving more rapidly than ever, and in case you weren’t aware, there’s a war going on for your customers. With challengers attacking from left, right, and centre, it’s never been more important to stay on top of the latest and greatest UX innovation. Pssst – click here to go straight to the goods and request a demo of 11:FS Pulse.

The opportunity to change the way we deliver financial services is changing as new channels, products and partnerships are being explored. Banking as a Platform (BaaP) is one of the alternatives.By me, David M. Brear, CEO and Co Founder at 11:FS and Pascal Bouvier, Venture Partner at Santander InnoVentures

While 2015 was just awesome on nearly all fronts, I think the close of the year has left us with a cliff hanger that George RR Martin would be rather proud of. For the curious among you, the question remains what’s next? What will 2016 bring? Across the actors and audiences, we feel there are the 9 questions we need to answer to be able to gauge who the winners and losers in 2016 banking will be. To get to the bottom of these questions, we have given our opinion, have asked a panel for their inputs and have asked a few expert friends of Think Different Group also for theirs.