Global

65 million years ago, gigantic monster roamed the same places where today Starbucks and Costa Coffees are. Having dragged themselves out of the primordial goo and evolved themselves to the top of the food chain, the Dinosaurs were oversized in their appetites, attitudes and on top of the world. What can the monsters of today learn from the monsters of the past to avoid the extinction events that wiped out the dinosaurs? Let us explore, with Jurassic Park puns and quotes aplenty… hold on to your butts.

In the first of a new series we’re talking to our brilliant 11s to get to know them a little bit more. From the consultants building new digital propositions and the research team using cultural insights to inform them, through to the engineers bringing those services to market, the operations team that keeps the lights on, and everyone else in between.

The talk of disruption of banking by fintech companies has quelled a little recently as realisation sets in as to just how difficult that actually is. The talk now is of partnerships between the two that mutually benefit both parties. We have not really seen many partnerships in the true sense between fintech and the old banks yet, they are still using fintechs in traditional vendor relationships.

As you may have noticed I’ve been doing a lot of teasing around this for the last few months. Well today...right now...is the grand reveal as we celebrate the public launch of our 11:FS values.

I used to hate when my parents came into high school for the annual speech from my teachers that I should be trying a lot harder. Unlike my report cards at school, I think the 11:FS end of year report would read pretty damn well as every single person that has worked for 11:FS couldn’t have done more to make it a success over the last year.

In her latest column for Forbes, 11:FS Head of Research Sarah Kocianski analyses Chime's recent outages and challengers' reliance on third-party processors.

A guest post by Jessica Holzbach, Head of Customer Relations at Penta CRM is often misconstrued or just written off as email marketing. As such, startups often forget to factor in true customer retention management into their marketing strategies, until they have too many customers that their current methods are not scalable.

Taste your product, be big and fast, invest in your own teams and partner with Snoop Dogg. Chief Commercial Officer of Klarna, Michael Rouse has more than a few nuggets of wisdom to share.

This post appeared first in The Times and Raconteur in the UK in June 2016. Until the financial crisis banks had enjoyed decades of growth unencumbered by the disruption seen in the newspaper, telecommunications and music industries. During the good years banks’ profits soared and, while they embraced customer-facing internet and mobile apps, the foundations, processes and technology on which banks are built, despite billions spent on technology, would look familiar to those who worked there in the 1970s. UK banks now face the perfect storm of significant technological advancements plus a regulator and government that want to foster innovation, and an ever-growing disillusionment of banking customers to banks’ offerings.

When it comes to managing bills and expenses, there’s a variety of products available on the market. Some are not amazing, others are good, but there is still a gap for an offering tailored to student needs.

Antony Jenkins, former CEO of Barclays, has spent 35 years working in large financial services institutions. He says that it struck him that, although there’s a lot of technology in banks, it doesn’t help much when it comes to improving the customer experience or lowering costs, and it hasn’t improved the reputation of banks within society. He founded 10x to create a new banking experience — one that is more diverse, open, and fair. In episode 229 of FinTech Insider, he talks to us about his new company, the future of banking, and the transition from running one of the biggest banks in the world to founding a startup.

Spending billions on digital transformation – and bragging about it – seems to be the only game in town for large incumbent banks. But this spending hasn’t paid off, and financial institutions continue to battle a heavy fixed-cost base. You know digital transformation is critical, so how do you convince an incumbent bank’s CFO and CxOs that digital transformation doesn’t have to cost billions or take decades?

In the past decade, the banking industry has seen an incredible amount of innovation and disruption. New entrants like Monzo in the UK and Nubank in Latin America are finally taking on the incumbents that, for decades, were impossible to challenge.

The UK’s digital-only challenger banks are currently engaged in something of an arms race to offer customers the broadest range of features and services. Hot on the heels of joint accounts, coming soon from both Monzo and Starling, came Monzo’s announcement that its customers can now use TransferWise within the bank’s app to send money abroad.

I’m sure that you’ve seen the same presentations that I have. An expert from a large consultancy stands up and his first slide says “API stands for Application Programming Interface”. He continues with a description of new regulations (PSDII / CMA) and describes the technology that will let customers give third parties to access their banking data and trigger new transactions. That’s all true, but it’s a mistake to start there, it leads in the wrong direction.