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Happy New Year boys and girls 🙂 May 2017 be a great one for you and yours! This is the New Year Special where I look back at my 9 highlights from 2016, dish out 10 immensely prestigious awards and take a peak at 2017.
So without futher ado lets kick off the awards… Continue reading
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After organising nearly 1,000 folks in the O2 for Europe’s largest P2P conference ever I managed to grab Peter long enough to have a fascinating tour of the globe and P2P sitrep in the three major hubs.
Peter Renton has perhaps has more of a broad and deep understanding of P2P worldwide than anyone.
When he first came on the show way back in LFP015 he shared with us the fascinating history of US P2P with its hugely up and down roller-coaster road.
Since then he has created the world’s go-to conferences on P2P in the US, China and Europe which gives him a unique insight into what’s what and where.
It’s a big world and P2P is a vast domain these days so there is plenty to discuss. Key topics are: Continue reading
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source: focusrs.org
This is London Fintech Podcast episode 42, the answer to life, the universe and everything. Well a bit of everything anyway. And I have the pleasure to be joined today by – er – myself.
In the now traditional (um – can doing something twice be a tradition?) first podcast of the year step away from diving into a topic with an esteemed guest and take a more top of the mountain view of the landscape.
As it’s a bumper funpack we will cover a whole range of topics all of which pertain to Fintech.
So we start today’s show with the relevance of Star Wars; move on to beer and deep dive into a topic that applies to Fintech and to the whole of our perception of the world, the media – mainstream and indie.
Next a review of key themes from 2015 UK Fintech and finally we wrap up with some thoughts about the future.
In the next episode I’ll be back to the far easier task of asking folks smarter than I the answer to life the universe and everything or at least what’s going on in their corner of the Fintech phenomenon
Share and enjoy!
Happy New Year to all 🙂
~~~
Links I reference are:
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The road goes on forever – the next Lendit is already lined-up
I am delighted to be joined by Peter Renton to discuss some key highlights from the Lendit Europe 2015 conference, especially for those of you who weren’t there and even for those of you who were as in the afternoon it split into two streams.
Peter was back on the show in LFP015 way back in last December wearing his Lend Academy hat relating to us the amazing story of the development of P2P in the US – something he saw from it’s very origins when it was scarcely noticed.
Today he is joining me wearing his Lendit Conference hat. Lendit now runs by far the world’s largest P2P conferences – some 2,500 in Lendit US 2015, 500 in Lendit China 2015 and yesterday around 750 in Lendit Europe.
In this episode we have an off-the-cuff conversation about what leaps out to us as the really interesting things happening in P2P in Europe right now. It’s a great way to get up the curve fast and we discuss a wide range of topics: Continue reading
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Co-founders Samir, James and Andrew
Funding Circle need no introduction being the heavyweight SME marketplace lender in the UK and the only global player to have a large footprint in both the UK and the US. Those on the conference circuit may be more familiar with Andrew’s co-founders, Samir Desai and James Meekings; Andrew has tended to stay at home with his head under the bonnet working on the engine within Funding Circle – that of the credit underwriting process.
SME lending is a prosaic phrase but one that is vital for a modern economy that is undergoing an ever increasing bifurcation into gigantic oligopolistic corporations or smaller companies. Finance is the lifeblood of such smaller companies and as the first line of Andrew’s LinkedIn says:
“The aim of every business should be to change the way other people live their lives for the better, not that of the founders!”
They are certainly doing that and at this rate will deservedly also change the lives of the founders and staff as Funding Circle are on everyone’s “tiny handful” list of big players with very short odds to IPO.
In this show we dive into the world of SME credit and lending in the Fintech Age.
Plenty of hardcore content; points discussed include: Continue reading
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The New Year is a time of reflection, a time for looking forwards and a time to take stock. So in this light this will be a special, somewhat off-piste episode with just me at the microphone. This episode has three parts:
In Part 1 I talk about some of the behind the scenes stories that go into making the LFP and share some of my thoughts about the challenges of the creative journey – a journey which many fintechs will have been through and are going through.
In Part 2 I discuss the five themes that I expect to see in UK Fintech in 2015. These all go under the overarching banner of “2015 – The Year When Fintech Grows Up”.
If Xmas is a time for traditional rituals like family, over-eating, and hitting Amazon Prime bigtime 😀 it’s also a time for thinking of those less fortunate than ourselves.
If you work in Canary Wharf you will probably never see a homeless person there (I never have – are they kept out?). Meg Hillier the MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch points out that in Hackney a staggering 47% of children live in poverty :-O 🙁
In Part 3 I discuss the wider societal impact of Fintech and its media narratives.
Will Fintech, driven by the “billion dollar IPO narrative” end up being just another “get rich quick scheme” for a tiny few and become self-centred and greedy like the existing widely-disliked banking system?
Is Fintech just about creating some new mega-corporates that will live in tall shiny buildings?
Can Fintech be more than this? Can it have a social conscience, can Fintech contribute to society and make the world a better place?
Let me know what you think! In my pre-Xmas mode of thinking of those less fortunate than ourselves I tweeted a few socially pertinent tweets under the hashtag #OccupyFintech. For those of you interested in this topic please feel free to use and amplify. You don’t even have to sleep outside in the cold in a tent 😀
In the next episode Continue reading
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This is a mega-episode Xmas present special for London Fintech Podcast listeners 🙂 The world of Fintech has changed forever with this month’s successful twin IPOs on the NYSE of Lending Club and On Deck – both with valuations in ten figures. It’s certainly an epochal shift for Alternative Finance Lending & Borrowing (P2P) around the world.
UK Fintech does not exist in a vacuum and it’s important to understand how other markets are evolving. Naturally in a world of globalisation the US market and New York in particular are perhaps the most important “must knows” for anyone on the UK Fintech scene.
Above and beyond that the story of the US P2P is a cracker – the more I drilled into it the more that “fact” turned out to be once again better than “fiction” – and in this case more entertaining in terms of the twists and turns on the road.
I am delighted to be joined today by a man supremely able to tell that story from many angles. As a commentator on the scene Peter Renton has been blogging for several years about the US P2P scene – long before it was hot and fashionable. As an investor he has been an active participant and experienced its evolution first hand.
From his initial personal interest has grown a range of businesses – Peter is the founder of Lend Academy, co-founder of Lend Academy Investments, and co-founder of LendIt Conference which albeit mostly active in the US, had a very successful recent conference in the UK (you can see some great videos of the UK P2P presentations here) and one this year in Shanghai. He has written a short, free e-book on the US P2P market which is freely available for download here. He – clearly a busy guy – also finds the time to fit in a great podcast on the US P2P scene (search for “Lend Academy” on iTunes/Android App).
We have a wide-ranging conversation about the history of US P2P, the present and possible futures. We also discuss similarities and differences with the UK P2P market, what the UK market should be grateful for – and we don’t actually discuss where it’s falling behind – but how many UK multi-billion IPOs were there in December? 😉
Threading through this is one of the best stories out there about US P2P. Superficial surfers might be tempted to think its just “the same old” US tech success story. Continue reading
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Should have gone to Specsavers?
The Daily Mail hasn’t yet written about how Bitcoin causes cancer. I’m rather surprised given the hysterical tone of much Bitcoin coverage. “It’s going to a million dollars!”. “It’s going to zero!”. “It’s the future of money!”. “It’s a scam!”. “It’s for drug dealers and terrorists!” . And those comments are just from the sober broadsheets 😀
[And just in passing the currency accepted by terrorists and drug dealers worldwide is a wad of US$ bills – nothing is going to displace that soon ;-)]
Oh dear.
In this episode I am very glad to welcome Dr James Smith, CEO and co-founder of Elliptic – a company founded by three PhDs – which has recently raised £2m to grow it’s business as a digital custodian of digital currencies. As per the photo above even the Chancellor George Osbourne is happy to be photographed at a Bitcoin ATM. So we can assume there must be something more to Bitcoin than hysteria if hommes serieux are coming to the party. Continue reading
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This week I have the great pleasure of being in conversation with Warren Bond, co-founder of matchi.biz. It’s a great way to start the London Fintech Podcast interviews as both this podcast and matchi.biz are about bridging the worlds of suits and t-shirts, of incumbents and innovators. If matchi.biz continue to deliver on their promise and scale successfully they will be that rarest of things – a real game-changer.
This is a must-listen to show for any Fintech aiming to sell into banks.
Matchi.biz is something of a combination of an innovation marketplace/database and a dating service. On one side innovators sign-up (to sell) and on the other side sponsoring banks (to buy). It’s free to try and (IMO) amazingly cheap to use. I wish it had existed 15yrs ago when I had my own Fintech startup selling in to banks. Continue reading
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When I told folks I was going to be launching a FinTech Podcast the most common reply was “What’s FinTech?” and “What’s a Podcast?”. Hardly auspicious beginnings 🙂
Well if you are here then you know what a Podcast is – it’s an audio file you can listen to online or download and listen to offline. Even better you can subscribe on your smartphone via an app such as iTunes or (my favourite) Pocket Casts. These will periodically check for updates and ensure that your commutes or long car drives are never as boring again.
As to the tougher question 🙂 rather than diving in with a FinTech interview (which is the theme of London FinTech Podcast) I thought it would be a good idea to start with an overview of FinTech. In a recent survey 9 out of 10 of my City chums hadn’t heard of FinTech in the sense it is now being used. In an even more informal survey at drinks with a group of four developers none of them had heard of FinTech.
So perhaps Job 001 is to educate about the context and what is going on. To this end in this first podcast I cover four questions:
Enjoy and I will see you next time when we get rather lower than 30,000 feet and start talking to folks in the sector. In the meantime follow us on Twitter @LondonFinTech and spread the word 🙂