Tag Archives: FX

LFP165 – Relationship Banking – the Surprising Answer to the Needs of Growing Techs? Tom Butterworth MD Silicon Valley Bank

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In a world ever-more focused on transactions and digitisation what place is there for relationship-banking? Apparently not a lot, yet the market-leader – SVB – wholly embraces this approach over the whole journey from Startup to FTSE. In this show we discuss what relationship banking means in the 21stC for one of the hottest sectors in the market.

SVB is the commercial bank for high growth companies and the biggest banker for PE/VC firms. In the UK they have 4,000 clients, over one thousand of which are pre-series A. As we heard in LFP163 SVB are also the world leaders in Venture Debt.

Tom Butterworth is the Head of Early Stage at SVB in London and joins us today to talk about the importance of relationship-banking, of looking after the customer and of viewing the financial aspect of the relationship across the whole life cycle of high growth companies.

We discuss how serving a vertical can enhance the clients in many ways as well as produce the deal flow to make the approach commercially viable – knowing a single sector in great depth leading to, inter alia, a much deeper understanding of credit-risk than simply putting numbers in a spreadsheet.

Topics discussed in this show include: Continue reading →

LFP164 – A Deep Dive Into Ripplenet, A Key 21stC Global Payments Approach, with Marcus Treacher SVP Customer Success Ripple

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Payments are being revolutionised. One of the most fascinating examples is Ripplenet – Ripple’s approach to inverting the old model of slow large payments to super-fast, immediate, small payments (the general trend) which will change payments forever. Ripplenet “an internet of value” is used by over 300 Financial Institutions in more than 45 countries, as a next gen global payments infrastructure.

 Marcus has over 30 years of experience in transaction banking and payment technology, including 12 years at HSBC, being a member of the Global Board of SWIFT and an independent non-executive director of CHAPS Co, the UK’s RTGS clearing company.

In this show we start with the super-big picture of how payments have changed over the centuries, how the challenge is not simply tech but how people and organisations relate to this before spiraling in to a schematic overview of the three layers than amount to Ripple’s solution. Continue reading →

LFP161 – Global B2B Payments & Multi-Rail Technology w/Marwan Forzley CEO Veem

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Marwan  joins us to discuss global payments for small businesses. He has been in payments for many years and was first a founder in 2002 so speaks from long experience of both. Veem is a global payments network used by small businesses around the world which allows them to pay their vendors, suppliers and contractors anytime, anywhere.They do payments to 110 countries in 50 plus currencies, and have about 200,000 B2B customers.

One important way that Veem manage such a long list of countries is to use a unique “multi-rail” technology – basically having wired up a bunch of different conduits from bank to bank transfers at one end through the likes of card payments to via crypto currencies at the other. This enables them to have a broader range of options for any particular transfer and for the end-users enables them to have a much richer range of payments destinations.

Topics discussed include: Continue reading →

LFP145 – New Year Special! 2020 Hindsight – A Decade In Fintech

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In this show we review a decade in Fintech. Although the earliest Fintechs were formed around 2004/5 (WorldFirst, Zopa) many big names formed around 2010 (Funding Circle, Ratesetter, MarketInvoice). The LFP formed started covering the scene in mid-2014, the year of the first London Fintech week and the year that the Fintech word first hit the broadsheets. Using the shownotes at the time as a diary I trace the evolution of the promises, the hopes, the disappointments, the old innovations and the new innovations. Where did it all go?

No long show notes this week – it is a podcast podcast and in listening you can draw your own conclusions – indeed that’s the point of using dozens of real world examples as seen at the time not as seen through the dark glass of memory.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the London Fintech scene and wider UK Fintech scene and to all listeners. Want to know what the next decade might hold? Check out the previous decade and join the dots…!

LFP110 – Deep-Dive Into How To Do International FX For A Minimal Transaction Fee w/Daumantas Dvilinskas CEO TransferGo

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TransferGo‘s slogan is “Send money around the world. Fast. For just 99p” which is a super-cheap flat fee. In terms of price they deal at a variable 2+% to flat 0.45% (above £1000) on top of the mid-market rates with a known price when you deal. They also transfer in under 30 minutes and have a 96% 5* rating on Trustpilot which is the best in their sector.

However today we focus on the transaction fee. How can they charge so little? Is there some way the transaction fee can trend to zero whilst keeping a constant spread to mid-market rates?

How do Fintech FX’s actually do transactions way cheaper than banks when, after all, all money is held in bank accounts?

As we have heard many times before it is not – contrary to some spin/PR prevalent in the market – by doing “P2P FX”. So how is it done?

Topics discussed on the show include these and more:  Continue reading →

LFP106 – Bumper Episode! The Future of Leveraged Trading, UX, & Education w/Ivan Gowan CEO Capital.com

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On the show this week we have a bumper edition – the future of leveraged trading, online/in-app education, IT Dev, user experience design, new ESMA rules – and much more, Responsible for this fireworks show is Ivan Gowan CEO of multi-award winning capital.com. who have125 staff and over £30m of capital.

In the previous episode LFP105 we covered the digital approach to execution-only stockbroking.

In this episode we cover the more rarefied world of leveraged trading which democratises as it were the magical powers of hedge funds to trade efficiently and leverage positions. You can see this as a crossover of capital markets Fintech and trading for sophisticated investors. One for the cognoscenti but a market which has seen huge growth in the past two decades. Fintech is truly revolutionising everything.

Both last weeks episode and this cover the waterfront of the disintermediation of investment management. It’s also important not to see them as opposing – most moneyed folks will have a core portfolio that is solid and stable and those that do leveraged trading do it with a portion of their funds.  As we come into in the show the demographic of such folks is pretty wide going far beyond the ex-traders that I had always imagined.

So without further ado lets sketch some of the detailed topics in this episode. Topics discussed on the show include: Continue reading →

LFP102 – Special Episode! Entrepreneurship + Can App Banks Become Proper Businesses? w/Ricky Knox CEO Tandem Bank

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App Banks are following many courses with many motivations. Who better to guide us through this ever more complicated maze of motivations and destinations than Ricky Knox, Founder and CEO of Tandem Money/Bank and serial entrepreneur sans pareil.

inter alia (alia being things like Insead) Ricky founded GSM Systems in 2003 (where he remains non-exec chairman) which now has partnerships with >170 mobile operators in >70 countries.

In 2005 he founded Small World Services taking it from inception to a Top10 global money transfer businesses with nigh on $5bn annual turnover.

Not content with these laurel leaves he founded the well-known Fintech Azimo in 2012 which does remittances to 198 countries globally, has half a million customers and more than 270,000 cash pick-up locations worldwide.

In 2015 he founded Tandem Bank, which (another inter alia) bought Harrods Bank – which certainly makes it a standout in Fintech as a whole, let alone in the App-Banks sub-sector.

All of which background (and more not included!) makes him ideal to discuss whether the current crop of App Banks are going to turn into real businesses – you know those businesses that are self-supporting and whose revenues are higher than their costs 🙂

Topics discussed include: Continue reading →

LFP096 – A Deep Dive into Marketplaces in the Fintech Age with David Mercer CEO LMAX Exchange

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Which UK FIntech does $3trn of business per annum and are in 7 countries? Well I guess for readers on the website the pic above is a bit of a hint. David Mercer CEO LMAX Exchange joins us today to dive into the subject of marketplaces which have been a fundamental part of culture forever and a fundamental part of Fintech as a mechanism for connecting buyer and seller more efficiently.

LMAX Exchange’s claim is that they are leading the global FX industry transformation to transparent and fair execution. Sounds good but before we get around to that we look in depth at Marketplaces per se.

Topics discussed in the episode include:  Continue reading →

LFP095 – The 5 Keys to Successful International Expansion w/Jonathan Quin CEO WorldFirst

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Which Fintech started in a basement in Stockwell, has done over £65bn of FX business, do over 1 million transfers a year with 600 staff in 7 offices, whose chairman is a former deputy Governor of the Bank of England and according to price comparison sites offer better prices than other Fintech FX players on virtually all sizes of deal?

Worldfirst as many of you might not have guessed (though those of you reading this online will have had a huge hint in terms of the banner above 😀

Jonathan Quin their co-founder and CEO for 14yrs joins us today to discuss the art and science of international expansion – a truly vital step if UK Fintechs are ever to move beyond a potential audience of 1% of the world’s population to far far more.

Topics discussed on the show include:  Continue reading →

LFP075 – Managing Fintech Rebundling with Nikolay Storonsky CEO of Revolut

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One of the founding ethos of Fintech was “unbundling” – the slicing of FS into single-issue firms. This is now looking old-hat. Revolut acquired 500,000 customers in less than two years by offering interbank rates on FX transfers and so was one of the most successful of Fintech 1.0.

Now they are leading the way with Fintech 2.0 offering a whole range of products. Managing this transition with respect to both “the brand” and “the app” is not trivial and I am delighted to be joined today by co-founder and CEO Nikolay Storonsky.

Unlike Monzo who have gone down the banking route but Revolut have remained with the simpler/cheaper/faster but narrower e-money issuer licence.

 

Topics discussed on the show include: Continue reading →