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

Guest author Roy Ng, CEO and Co-Founder of Bond, shares his thoughts on how Banking as a Service (BaaS) has the potential to benefit pretty much everyone, but a few select groups in particular.

The fourth episode of our brand-new video series, Decoding: Banking as a Service, is here! If you missed it (or any of the others) catch up here. Here’s a rundown of this episode if you prefer reading to watching 📖

Hopefully, by now you’ve had a chance to digest some, if not all, of our inclusive design series.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is one of the hottest trends in fintech. The concept of 0% finance has been around for decades, but it’s caught fire in the last 3 years with new market entrants like Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna transforming how this works for consumers in an e-commerce setting. 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.

While FinTech folk salivate – and the big banks bloviate – about PSD2 and the open banking reforms coming our way in 2018, we wondered whether those outside of this bubble will actually notice? What does PSD2 actually mean for customers?

A Black-owned bank is defined as one in which at least 50% of voting shares are owned by African-Americans. They’re a dwindling force in the States today.

Throughout history, humans have found direction from statements of intent that suggest 'better' ways of living.

The first episode of our brand-new video series, Decoding: Banking as a Service, is live! If you missed it, catch up here. Here’s a rundown of the episode if you prefer reading to watching 📖

Nothing’s worse than not having any options, but having too many can be just as bad.

We now live in a world where almost anyone can build and launch innovative, regulated financial products as easily as they can create a Shopify page - that’s the magic of Banking as a Service (BaaS).

As 11:FS wraps up its 5th year in business, we can’t help but think about what the next 5 will look like. And our ambitions are big. It’s only just on the right side of scary.

This is the second instalment of a 6 part series that explores the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) for US SMBs that we identified in our recent research. Each blog post explores one of the jobs and how we examined it with a JTBD canvas. If you missed the first post that explains JTBD and the canvas, check it out before reading this.

Richard Brown, CTO at R3, says that blockchain allows us to, for the first time, build systems and technologies that run between different organisations that don’t trust each other and bring them to consensus. This means potentially significant savings for financial services, especially in file reconciliation and manual activity. For blockchain to succeed in finance, multiple firms must work together, and Corda is helping to do just that.

There’s a reason counties often refer to their tech hubs as “the Silicon Valley of [insert country name here].” The Bay Area is the proud birthplace of some of the world’s biggest technological triumphs, home to global powerhouses like Apple and Visa. Every year the Valley also attracts a host of fintech start-ups - such as Credit Karma, Chime and Varo Bank, to name a few. But it’s not just California driving the future of financial services. We’ve done our research to see which companies across the 50 states are leading the fintech charge. (Did you miss our first blog? See who’s doing awesome things on the other side of the pond with our list of the hottest European fintechs.)

I speak to a lot of customers about how money fits into their lives. I’ve never come across anyone who said “what I really need is a bank” or more specifically banking products like credit cards or savings accounts. Customers don’t want your products, they want to achieve their goals.People talk about helping their kids go to university or getting the best deal on their mobile phone. Of course, people require money and some kind of financial products to do these things. However, the cold reality for banks is that their commoditised products are not helping customers make progress towards these important jobs in their lives.At 11:FS we help build truly digital next generation digital propositions. Central to this is grounding intelligent digital propositions in customer Jobs To be Done (JTBD).