Learn about the latest FS trends and news, from industry experts.

Backend development for greenfield banking requires a special set of needs. We use Kotlin as our programming language. Here’s why.

2017 is drawing to a close, it’s been an amazing year for fintech and banking, there’s been so many changes, new companies, products, services and innovation across the industry. For a full rundown of the best (and worst) stories from 2017, listen to our After Dark Christmas Special where we recap the whole year. However, as 2018 is fast approaching, we’re looking ahead and getting some predictions in for the next year. We asked the 11:FS co-founders and team and our Fintech Insider News community what they thought would be the big themes of 2018. The biggest topics were as follows:

I am a big basketball fan. It was my love, my passion, before I really even knew what financial services was. Back then my life was focused on how good my crossover was, how clean my kicks were and whether I could dunk rather than whatever it is I do today as the CEO of 11:FS!

Up until recently, if you wanted to launch a financial product, you either had to work directly with the deep financial infrastructure yourself or use a core banking system, which has all sorts of rules and parameters, to interact with the financial infrastructure.

With 11:FS Pulse you can.

In our third design drill down, we’re looking at how new approaches to insurance can bring innovative uses of technology, turn claim making into an enjoyable experience and bring a fresh perspective to big life decisions.

After a busy year in crypto, 11:FS co-founder Simon Taylor checks in on his 2019 predictions to see what he got right and what he missed.

GDPR, MiFID II, Solvency II, SCA, PSD2, Brexit… The past decade has been pretty hard on Compliance teams if not only for all the acronyms they need to remember.

Over the past few months, 11:FS Ventures has seen a spike in interest from clients in private banking and wealth management.

We’re all busier than ever. Not even the most efficient human can cope with the trials we all face and the tasks we all have to do on a daily basis. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. 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.

Do you remember when you first saw a newspaper app on an iPad? It was as though a physical newspaper had been trapped under the black glass. There was even a page turning animation that you probably showed your friends. It was magical. It was digitised news. Ditto for buying albums on iTunes and ordering a traditional taxi; amazing experiences, but we just took what had come before and translated it directly to the new medium.

Africa is the most worthy market for mainstream adoption of decentralised finance. Why? I could go on and on about the underbanked, underserved populations and fragmented remittance ecosystem - while that’s all valid, the biggest pain point in my mind is currency devaluation. Volatile currencies make it difficult for Africans’ savings to hold their value. Solving for currency devaluation will provide the beachhead for the adoption of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) across Africa.

When our friends at Garanti asked us to take a look at their app, we could see pretty quickly that they were doing things a little differently. A traditional Turkish bank that broke away from the pack, Garanti is integrating next-generation services into their mobile app. Let’s look at our top 5 features.

In the second of this monthly design series, we look at a rebrand done right, an app that bids to be the future of car management, and one firm designing a better relationship between finance and the environment.

Nobody sets out to block innovation in their organisation. It just happens.