Global

There’s a lot of recession talk at the moment. Are we entering the next recession? Are we already in it? We all remember the 2008 financial crisis, and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, and all the financial trouble they caused.

I speak to a lot of banks and I get asked the same question: “How do I test my product ideas?” The secret is understanding how your customers measure value and align your proposition to their definition of success. However, the temptation for a lot of corporate innovation teams is to jump straight into product design which ultimately slows you down and sends you in the wrong direction. To set off in the right direction and accelerate to market you need to return the customer Job. Jobs To Be Done is a technique being used by some of the most innovative digital brands in the world.

Henry Ford owned the plants that manufactured rubber, glass, and steel to build the Ford Model T. Now car companies have a network of specialist suppliers of glass, rubber, and other key parts. These suppliers are better at building glass or rubber than the car companies themselves. You know that Henry Ford’s business model is no longer viable; that’s why you subcontract for multiple pain points in the industry. Why focus on developing all your own security when you can outsource it to specialists?

Jobs to be done (JTBD). It’s an interesting phrase. Pithy, agile-sounding, and adaptive. It’s about bringing humanity to an industry that sometimes forgets about it.I spoke to Ryan Garner, Innovation and Insight lead at 11:FS about what it means to introduce jobs to be done to the fintech space. And how being human is core to delivering a meaningful product. Ryan knows the only way for fintech to succeed is to understand people.

Open Banking turned one on Sunday, but why has no-one made a big deal about it despite all the potential?

Sports people make better business people. There, I said it. I’ve said it before so you shouldn't be too surprised at this point but I honestly believe in this statement.

I’ve read an awful lot of research reports in my professional life. I also studied History at university and if that doesn’t set you up with the ability to detect sense from nonsense when it comes to research, I don’t know what will. More recently, I’ve written a lot of market research reports and have every intention of writing more in the future. But I want my next set of research outputs to be different. So I turned to Twitter, that great hotbed of opinion, to conduct a survey (with many methodological holes) to find out what people’s biggest bugbears are with most of the content out there today.

I love the Showtime drama series Billions. It gets two big thumbs up from me and I highly recommend binge-watching the series. You'll thank me later.I recently finished season 3 of the program and I actually burst out laughing during the beginning of the show. Real-life celebrities and billionaires are a constant staple of the series. Past guests have included Mark Cuban, Maria Sharapova, and even my beloved Metallica. But what made me chuckle was the brief appearance of Sara Blakely playing, well, herself.And why not? She's a self-made billionaire and founder of Spanx as I detailed in my first blog post on the commonalities between the Spanx product and the digitization of financial services. Seeing her pop up on my screen while watching the season finale prompted me to sit down and write part 2 of this blog post.

11:FS announced today that Microsoft has become a strategic partner over the forthcoming months across our Fintech Insider podcasts. Microsoft wants to be an integral part of tackling some of the biggest challenges in financial services and collaborate on topics of interest to the industry audience.

You may have noticed recently that we’ve putting out a bit of content around our interns, like Petrit, Sam, and Tom. In a move that should surprise no-one, we’re launching the start of our internship programme today! For all you students and fintech fans we’ve got a list of top tips you should follow to get ahead of the curve. The rest of our wonderful readers should be sharing this with everyone you know looking to get into fintech. You don’t need a degree to apply, just be awesome.

We’ve finally turned 2! Just two short years ago a small group of plucky young(ish) fintech experts set up our challenger consultancy. They also kicked off a podcast that has become probably the best fintech insight platform out there thanks in no small part to the amazing (and wholly unbiased in this case) media team.

Offering customers access to cryptocurrencies is fast becoming a must-have feature for fintechs in the banking and investment segments. Startups are racing each other to launch the broadest range of services possible in this space.Revolut has today taken another step forward in this arena by adding XRP and Bitcoin cash to the range of cryptocurrencies customers can buy, hold, and sell within its app.

Over the last two years we have kept coming back to one diagram, the 11:FS Banking Battlefield. We use this to explain the changes we see in the financial services industry. In fact, one particular workshop we did in Australia last year had us talking through this diagram for the entire day! Seriously. It also featured in three bank board packs in the last 6 months which is also a pretty good indication we’re onto something.

For many large financial institutions, cloud is, increasingly, the answer. Not that they’re necessarily sure what the question is, but the answer is definitely cloud.

When news broke a week or so ago that, Swedish payment fintech, iZettle planned to IPO this year, I pondered whether it would be the first of a flood of European fintech IPOs. We now know it won’t.