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

It's a truism that the hardest job in engineering is that of 'Tech Lead'. You're the person who's not only writing code, but simultaneously leading a small group of other engineers and spending large amounts of time talking to stakeholders and the Product Manager (or, ten years ago, *Project* Manager). 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.

London’s been at the centre of the fintech bubble for over a decade now, and the rest of Europe isn’t far behind. One of the few silver linings of the coronavirus pandemic could be that it might act as a catalyst for a tonne of investment into fintech, as more and more people recognise the need to go digital. Despite the trend for falling investments in 2020, the UK fintech sector is still looking flush thanks to investments of over $1.84 billion. To give you a heads up on the next big companies on the scene, we’ve rounded up the hottest startups on our watch list 🔥

As we roll into 2018 thoughts inevitably turn to the big themes that we might expect (and hope) to see for user experience in the financial services industry this year.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a theory. Its main aim is to explain why customers start - and stop - using different products and services in the market. Stripped down to the essentials, it’s a fairly straightforward concept first introduced by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen that can be adapted into a useful tool for product development.

There’s been a huge leak of files from FinCEN, the US-based Financial Crime Enforcement Network. Over 2000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) and hundreds of other documents appear to show how banks have been unable to prevent trillions in money laundering, tax avoidance and criminality over the past decade. But there's a more in-depth story to uncover here.

David M. Brear interviewed Jonathan Larsen, CIO, Ping An and CEO of their Global Voyager Fund, a $1bn investment fund, specifically for fintech. He tells David all about the fund and the innovations in fintech coming from China and making a huge impact worldwide.

Guest author Richard Davies shares his reflections as he transitions from his role as Revolut’s COO to Non Exec at Revolut, and CEO of Allica Bank. As fuel for the future he looks at his learnings from Revolut as well as his wider experiences and inspirations over the last decade in financial services and fintech.

Good working culture is impossible without motivation. Therefore, it is essential to follow a model of organisation design that supports the conditions in which motivation can be maximised.

At 11:FS, we build digital financial services, primarily banks. ‘Bank’ is a very broad term, of course, and our focus on client needs and ‘Jobs To Be Done’ approach (“People don’t want a mortgage, they want to buy a house”), means that we rarely set out to build a pure bank.

The research on retail payments that I have done over the past couple of months had me thinking about my own payments journey and left me wondering how my own behaviour has evolved and what drove me to make such payments?

How can community banks remain competitive as large financial institutions gobble up more and more of the market?

It’s the 5th of April and that means one thing to us at 11:FS and that is that it’s our birthday! Four years old. Damn. And what a strange time to be in celebrating everything we’ve achieved with everything that’s going on.

There’s been no shortage of attention paid to the emergence of fintech in the Middle East recently. In fact, we wrote about the ‘perfect storm’ that was brewing in the region and recently gave an overview of the digital challengers emerging to meet these needs.

Until 2018 Australia hadn’t had a new, homegrown bank for decades. The Australian banking industry had been dominated by four huge banks who, facing no competition, rested on their laurels.

We’ve sifted through the data to find out what 11:FS Pulse users have been loving and where their focus has been for the last 12 months.