Dave and Dharm DeMystify

Charlie Platt is the Managing Director of Banking at SAP Fioneer. He talks about the history of the business and the advantages of it becoming a standalone business separate from SAP. He explains how the decision was made and the significant investment the company received. Charlie also discusses the continued strong partnership between SAP and Fioneer, with Fioneer utilising SAP's infrastructure and technology.

He highlights the importance of developing a strong company culture and the challenges that come with it. Charlie helps demystify the strategy for bringing new products to market and focusing on modernisation rather than core replacement.

Takeaways

Fioneer is a standalone business separate from SAP, focusing on core banking and insurance solutions.

The decision to separate was driven by the need for speed and agility in the rapidly changing financial services industry.

Fioneer retains a strong relationship with SAP and utilises its infrastructure and technology.

Chapters

00:42 Introducing Charlie Platt from Fioneer

02:02 Understanding Fioneer and its connection with SAP

04:09 The birth of SAP Fioneer and its unique business model

07:13 The challenges and triumphs of separating from SAP

11:37 The power of SAP's comprehensive technology stack

15:05 The importance of customer-centric product development

18:15 Exploring the future of banking innovation

21:13 The role of Fioneer in the modernization of banking

31:01 Conclusion: The journey towards a modern banking experience

In this enlightening episode, we talk with Lukky Ahmed, the visionary co-founder and CEO of Climate X, a trailblazing firm at the vanguard of highlighting climate risk through technological innovation.

With a rich background in international banking and expertise in risk management, regulatory change, and consultancy, Lukky shares how his experiences perfectly positioned him to address the critical data gaps in climate risk analysis.

Lukky demystifies Climate X's pioneering solution: a digital "twin" of Earth designed to map the probability and severity of extreme weather events decades in advance.

In this episode, we are very honoured to have Vaida Česnulevičiūtė Markevičienė, the Vice Minister for Finance for Lithuania, as our guest.

The Vice Minister tells about why Lithuania embraced the fintech opportunity and how it put a plan in place to ensure success. She discusses the importance of Government and Enterprise collaboration and how they have created a centre of excellence for fintech in Europe.

She moves on to talk about the green agenda and green fiance, how the country has a plan in place to achieve net zero by 2030, and what that means in securing energy independence with a focus on renewables such as solar and wind.

The guests on this week's fascinating show are Adam Moulson, COO of Griffin Bank and Garrett Foxon, CEO of LettsPay. Lettspay provides client accounts for Landlords, which are underpinned by Griffin's banking licence.

While the Lettspay solution sounds relatively niche, it plays in a massive market with over 4.5 million landlords in the UK and over 15000 real estate agents.

Garrett talks about how he built, evolved and grew Lettspay. He tells us how he used some basic research to identify the opportunity and how that insight translated into the Lettspay proposition. He also discusses why they partnered with Griffin Bank.

Adam shares his view on the opportunity for Griffin and why they feel confident about growing despite the competition.

This is a fascinating insight into why BaaS solutions can provide incredibly focused products and services for a particular niche and the opportunities they can unlock.

David Jarvis is the CEO and co-founder of Griffin. Griffin is the UK's only full-stack Banking-as-a-service bank. It is a very young organisation, receiving its license in March 2023.

David talks to us about his background working in development infrastructure for companies such as Airbnb in California, how he moved into the fintech space, and then how he jumped to founding a bank in the UK.

David provides incredible insight into what it takes to start a bank and the process Griffin had to go through to get a license. He does an incredible job of demystifying the Griffin proposition and how they believe it is fit for purpose to compete in the UK market place.

In the next podcast, we will hear from one of Griffin's customers, so tune in for that.

In this episode, our guest is Naif AbuSaida, the CEO and founder of Hakbah, a Saudi Arabian fintech focused on group savings. Naif talks us through his fascinating background, from being a media personality to working in utilities before moving into banking.

Naif tells us about how it was whilst undergoing chemotherapy for stage 3 colon cancer that he re-assessed his life and decided he wanted to have an impact on society, which led him to found Hakbah.

He talks us through the Hakbah proposition before changing gears and telling us about the Saudi approach to Fintech and how the regulator is helping to drive innovation.

Dave and Dharm chat with Andy Ellis, CEO of NatWest Boxed, and Noah Sharp, CEO of Vodeno, about Banking As A Service.

Boxed is a new BaaS provider from the banking heavyweight NatWest and European BaaS provider Vodeno. Rather than develop its core banking BaaS solution, NatWest partnered with Vodeno.

In this episode, we learn why NatWest partnered rather than built or used its own platform. Andy and Noah help demystify what is holding BaaS back from broader adoption and what it takes to create a successful BaaS venture.

It's clear the significant advantage Boxed has is its existing corporate banking clients, which include almost all the FTSE 250 companies.

From this show, you will also get advice on being a successful BaaS provider and launching a successful solution that uses BaaS.

Herve Manceron is the founder and CEO of Skaleet, a French SaaS-based core banking provider.

Herve started out in Telecoms, which many recognise as a vertical that is similar to banking. Herve clearly explains the similarities and what banking can still learn from an industry that has already gone through a technology transformation leveraging cloud technology.

During his time in Telecoms, he was involved in payment solutions in Africa which naturally led to working on a project for a bank there.

Herve shares his wealth of knowledge with; it is not often that you meet someone with such a natural progression to Banking-as-a-Service and developing scalable, flexible core banking solutions in the cloud.

Chris Tremont is Chief Digital Officer of Grasshopper Bank and Chris Dean is CEO of Treasury Prime, the embedded banking platform that Grasshopper uses.

Zor Gorelov is the founder and CEO of Kasisto the conversational AI company focused on Financial Services. Zor has a long history with conversational interfaces, having worked on them at Bell Labs over 30 years ago. He talks to us about his views on how and where to deploy these interfaces. We discuss the success of Kasisto and how it is now deployed in over 50 financial services companies of all sizes across 16 different countries. We then change gears and talk about the impact of Generative AI and KAI-GPT, Kasisto's new product, before moving on to Zor's views on the emergence of Artificial Financial Intelligence and why Kasisto is well-placed to be there at the front of the line when it happens. Zor's perspective on AFI against AGI is fascinating. We also talked a lot about wine!