Payments

Simon Taylor interviews Nathan Bostock, CEO of Santander UK. Nathan explains how Santander is embracing the tech changes facing the banking industry, and the shifting customer behaviours in their interactions with the bank with the help of digital innovation.

I find more and more people are starting to understand that digital is a transformation project, not just an adjunct to business as usual. But there needs to be more of them.

Each week, Leda Glyptis, CEO of 11:FS Foundry creates #LedaWrites. In this instalment she turns her attention to learning from mistakes.

Since this is the second year of the 11:FS Pulse Awards, we thought we’d go back and review the 11 brands that took first place in last year’s awards.

At 11:FS, we often talk about technologies and products that are tipped to disrupt the way financial services operate. The internet is littered with hype cycles and magic squares, with many of them growing into nothingness and obscurity. But cloud computing is probably the technology where we risk preaching to the choir more than any other topic, and yet adoption has still been slow.

When brands decide it’s time to build their community, they dive straight onto social media. It makes sense right? Social media gives you a platform to instantly connect with a huge number of people all over the world. Social media gives you a shortcut to connect, share, get feedback, and generally tell people what you’ve got going on. 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.

Much has been written about how Open Banking has announced itself with more of a whimper than a bang, since going live at the beginning of 2018.

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.

There have always been everyday tasks that seem complex, boring or too disinteresting for us to give them our full attention. Whether that’s as simple as ironing your laundry or as time consuming as learning a new language, often we’ll lack the drive or willpower to overcome the initial inertia to progress. 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.

China has long been on the radar of those with ambitions of marrying technological innovation with a payments-savvy population of big spenders. Traditionally, though, China’s economy had been centrally-planned, driven by investment and built around large state-owned enterprises (SOE). Banks had focused mainly on providing services for these SOEs, under-serving SME and retail consumers. So, naturally, with Alibaba and Tencent so successfully serving other areas – e-commerce and social media respectively – it should come as no surprise that they’ve found themselves filling this vacuum.

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…

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.

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.

About two months ago I wrote a job ad for a “Programme Delivery Lead” to come and join us at 11:FS to create a digital financial services product and take it to market. But things didn’t quite go as expected.

Derek Corcoran, CEO (Chief Experience Officer, not Chief Executive) at Avoka, paid a flying visit to 11:FS, straight off the plane from Colorado, for a Fintech Insider interview with Simon Taylor. Listen to the interview in full here, stream it below or read on for the highlights.