Tag Archives: Consultancy

LFP139 – A Fintech That Is Globally The Largest Non-Bank In Its Sector – Global Trade & Supply Chain Finance w/ Peter Cook PrimeRevenue

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Not many Fintechs dominate their sector let alone in one of the biggest markets in the world. PrimeRevenue was formed in 2003 and is the largest non-bank supplied of Supply Chain Finance in the world (working capital finance for global trade). They facilitate more than $200bn of payments per annum for 20,000 clients. In this show we dive into what it is that such a Fintech does. What can other Fintechs learn from one of the global best in Fintech?

Peter Cook who is head of all non-US sales talks us through how global trade actually works and the staggering sums of money that can be released from working capital using the appropriate techniques and how this can be win:win for vendor and buyer.

Topics discussed include: Continue reading →

LFP134 – Bumper Episode! Hot Topics in AI/ML – Prediction, Explainability, Alt Data, Self-Learning & Much More w/Tristan Fletcher CEO ChAI

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Tristan was last on the show some three years ago in LFP063 which has been solidly in the Top5 most downloaded episodes of all time even since. Today he joins us to update us on what is hot in AI/ML – and there’s a lot 😉 – along with predicting commodity prices.

Tristan is now CEO of ChAi who are creating insurance products for the commodity markets and at the forefront of some of the most interesting developments in AI/ML today.

In this episode we cover some of the key important developments and in particular dive into some amazing examples of how Alt Data is crucial to the developments. The focus in AI/ML is moving away from algorithms and onto data.

Topics discussed include: Continue reading →

LFP124 – The Reality of Being an Entrepreneur w/Ruzbeh Bacha CEO CityFalcon

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What is it actually like being an Entrepreneur? Despite being experienced and having an MBA Ruzbeh Bacha, CEO of personalised news aggregator/filter CityFalcon has found that the reality is very different from expectations. What is it really like? How hard can it be?

Media narratives are of some startups achieving amazing success with amazing amounts of work. Well the amazing amounts of work come to them all but the super-duper successes are perhaps less than 1%. And – like restaurants – most startups fail but one never gets to hear of those.

In between the great triumphs and the failures is a large limbo land. The reality is that for the majority of Fintechs that started say five years ago and are still going they have scored some successes (otherwise they wouldn’t be here). But, rather like swimming in a gloopy soup, there is much friction along the way be it the crazy times it takes to raise funds (every year being the rough rule of thumb) or crazily long purchase processes and buying decisions for BigCos or even with App Banks that boast millions of users (and so get into tech print as being “worth” billions the difficulty of actually doing the making money thing.

Topics discussed on the show include: Continue reading →

LFP067 – Rethinking Banking: Marketplaces and App-Only Banks with Tom Blomfield CEO Monzo Bank

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LFP Banner MonzoReformation or refactoring of banking is the Holy Grail of the Fintech Revolution. Do that and the revolution is a big deal. Get nowhere near and its all rather marginal. So-called challenger banks have ended up rather same-y. Will “App-only” banks end up going down the same route forced my micro-regulation and micro-supervision into the same tight mould. Or will they somehow remain within the constraints of the mould but somehow break it at the same time?

Its that paradox that faces Tom Blomfield CEO and founder of Monzo Bank. (and co-founder back in the day of GoCardless who were on the show in LFP046) A long way towards full authorisation as a bank will they become merely “me-too” or will they refactor banking as we know it?

Tom BlomfieldI have been an interested spectator on the sidelines for come time wondering which way the ball will bounce. At Lendit Europe 2016 I finally succumbed and took one of Tom’s pre-paid Mastercards – not least as which they offer wholesale exchange rates abroad and I was just off on holiday. It’s actually quite cool and more useful than expected. Certainly one gets a clear idea of what its like to feel like the business is really focusing on you as a customer-centric organisation with great design and service.

But back to the big picture – will Tom change the mould or will the mould change Tom?

Topics discussed include: Continue reading →

LFP061 – InsureTech the 30,000 Feet Guide with Jonathan Howe UK Insurance Lead at PwC

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PwC Banner_Orange_JGI am delighted to be joined today by Jonathan Howe UK Insurance lead at Price Waterhouse Coopers. As long time listeners will know I am very reluctant to give anyone a big picture topic on anything. Most folks are experts on one coalface and very few on the whole coal mine.

Jonathan HoweHowever Jonathan is a rara avis in the modern world in many ways. His linkedin career is perhaps the shortest I have read – one entry – 23 years at PwC. Now that’s the lifetime employment model that used to exist back in the day and exists for very few today. That’s also, compared to many butterflies in the modern world, an opportunity to dig a very deep well of experience and knowledge in a sector.

Secondly Jonathan leads the UK insurance practice (over 1,000 employees) and is responsible for PwC’s services for the UK Insurance Industry across all their range including audit, regulatory compliance, actuarial, consulting, tax and deals.

Thirdly PwC have been involved in a series of reports on the sector. Now plenty of reports are out there the more cynical amongst you may say and quality varies. True. However in “InsureTech a force for good”  Jonathan and colleagues have gone more than an extra mile. Amazingly they and their report partners Startupbootcamp have surveyed over 1,300 insurance startups. Wow.

Add that to decades in the industry and we have another of the rarest birds in the real world – someone who really is an expert.

The subtitle of “InsurTech a force for good” is an interesting overview “How InsurTech can reconnect insurers with their customers while simultaneously boosting the bottom line”

I met Jonathan at an event recently. It wasn’t a game of Top Trumps but if it had been Jonathan would have won hands down … when you have a database of 1,300 startups that’s a hell of a lot of facts to bring into any debate.

Topics discussed include – Continue reading →

LFP024 – Lessons from my 25yrs in Fintech, #oldFS, #newFS and VC with Nigel Verdon Founder of Currency Cloud

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Currency Cloud

I am delighted to be joined on the show today by Nigel Verdon founder and Chairman of Currency Cloud (who have always been my “Fintech insiders” Fintech of choice and have now done over $10bn of business) and also partner at OGC Capital – Anglo-Dutch VCs.

NIgel VerdonOn LinkedIn Nigel modestly describes himself as:

“Broad range of experience from tech guy to trader guy with deep industry experience in capital markets, foreign exchange, international payments and technology.”

It’s both novel and refreshing to see modesty in the modern world and (as generally) it’s massively misplaced.  Nigel has been – on anyone’s measure – a colossus in both the #oldFS and #new FS worlds and has now moved into the VC world.

He wrote an excellent piece last year entitled So What Is Fintech? which I recall for having been clearly and deeply thought-through – as rare in s-called “social” (selfcast?) media as modesty.  Only having discussed his career journey on this episode with him do I realise what it has taken to achieve that degree of insight and understanding.

In this wide-ranging and deeply insightful conversation about the long roots of Fintech we cover a broad range of topics including: Continue reading →

LFP022 – 30,000 Feet Overview of Payments with Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion

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Having done a few Alternative Finance shows recently it’s important to recall that there is another hardcore Fintech sector that is already changing the world (as opposed to threatening to in the future). This is payments.

One quarter of the Fintech50 are payments companies and when I looked a little while ago there were well over a thousand on Angelslist. So we definitely need a super sherpa to guide us through this landscape.

Consult Hyperion are an independent technical and strategic consultancy that specialises in secure electronic transactions. For two decades they have been working with technologies ranging from smart cards and mobile phones to contactless tickets and electronic ID in mass-market systems that include global payments, national and regional ticketing, international settlement, national identity and corporate  services.

So I think they might know a bit 🙂

Dave – besides being a member of the Amalgamated Union of Wheeltappers, Shunters and Podcasters was a founding director of the Consult Hyperion, is now their global ambassador and has decades of experience under his belt.

A very rich show with plenty about what is really going on with payments – especially from the strategic big picture perspective which certainly helps put the semi-infinite number of payments startups into some kind of context.

Topics discussed include: Continue reading →

LFP017 – Innovation Bridge Building between Startups and Incumbents with Samad Masood of Accenture

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Innovation may be great but it leads to challenges – for #newFS how to get it out there (I think the “how to do it” is going well right now”).  For #oldFS the challenge is “how to absorb it”.

This bridging is being done by both new and established firms. In LFP002 Warren Bond of matchi.biz (a smallco/fintech) discussed their dating/database approach to bridge.  In this episode Samad Masood who previously ran Accenture’s Fintech Innovation Lab and is now Open Innovation Lead at Accenture shares his experience of how a big, established player sees this challenge.

Samad has a deep background in this area having been involved in reporting on the startups just as the dot-com bubble was hitting its peak.  One of the key takeaways from that experience for him was that “the best technologies aren’t always the best businesses” – a lesson which needs to be borne in mind in the current boom. A further lesson was that innovation has a great impact than people expect but it also takes longer than they expect.

The fintech stone has been lobbed into a very large pool and the ripples have spread far. Accenture is a multinational management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Measured by revenues, the world’s largest consulting firm and has over 300,000 staff.

Notwithstanding this “large oil tanker” scale it has proved remarkably nimble and agile in orientating itself to the new world (and perhaps see their Ad above). Its reports on Fintech investment patterns are the most widely quoted of all. It was perhaps the first to set up a fintech accelerator program (in New York in 2012) which is now in NY, London, HK and now Dublin.

In terms of bridge building Samad describes his threefold topology of Fintechs: Continue reading →