Ross, David, and Sarah sit down with Diana Paredes, CEO of Suade Labs and Dr Sian Lewin, AKA the RegDoctor, Client Delivery Director at RegTech Associates. The group discuss the latest news hitting the fintech space this week including:

US charter for fintech, the U.S. Treasury on Tuesday backed the creation of a federal charter for financial technology firms, in a boon for online and peer-to-peer lenders that have long complained the current state-by-state licensing regime is expensive and outdated.

Apple steps up its fintech game, Apple Pay transactions tripled from a year earlier, to more than 1 billion. Cook said that was more than Square and exceeded mobile transactions via PayPal.

Zelle crosses 100 million transaction mark, US based P2P payments network owned and operated by US banks incl Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Users can send money to each other online or via a mobile app, from their existing affiliated bank accounts.

Steady launches to serve the US economy, Steady is the income-building platform for the Build-Your-Own (BYO) workforce, helping people create financial stability and take charge of their future. They have launched their app that will help US gig economy workers source new opportunities for work/income and to empower them to manage their income better.

Chinese regulators are scared of Ant, Ant Financial is now the world’s biggest fintech firm. It handled more payments last year than Mastercard - $8.8trillion vs $5.2trillion, controls the world’s largest money-market fund and tens of millions of people have received loans.

No action for RBS GRG scandal, The City watchdog has confirmed that it has no power to take action against the bank’s disgraced Global Restructuring Group over its treatment of small firms. GRG, which operated between 2005 and 2013, has been accused of pushing firms into bankruptcy in order to maintain its own profits. The FCA has said its powers for discipline do not apply in this case.

UK fintech tops global lists for investment in 2018, the UK has attracted more investment in fintech than any other country worldwide for the first half of the year, raking in $16.1bn (£12.3bn). China came in second place with $15.1bn, followed by the US with $14.2bn. Four of Europe’s top 10 fintech deals happened in the UK ($250m raise by Revolut, $100m by eToro, $60m by Flender and $54m by MoneyFarm), cementing the UK as a funding hotspot.

Brits in the dark on Open Banking, a Yougov survey revealed over 75% of Brits don’t know what it is. Of 2074 adults quizzed by YouGov, just 28% are aware of Open Banking. Even when YouGov gave survey participants a clear description of Open Banking, 45% could not understand the ways they could use it, against 18% who could.

Brits can't talk about money, 22% of people are comfortable discussing their finances, found a Starling survey

And finally, McAfee will pay you $100k if you get into his ‘unhackable’ crypto-wallet. He’ll give $100,000 to anyone who can break into the ‘Bitfi’ wallet, the supposedly ‘unhackable’ cryptocurrency storage device he has been parroting about on social media of late.

All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!

Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.

Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com

This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill and Michael Bailey.

Special Guests: Diana Paredes and Sian Lewin.

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Today's insights show takes a closer look at how to solve the major issues of opening a bank account, payments, and getting a loan that are challenging SMBs at the moment.

We speak to experts to find out who's going to win the race for SMB loyalty:

Last time we looked at SMB banking we heard from independent business owners about their individual experiences with SMB banking. Now we want to know if they're typical and if anything they said was surprising to the experts?

We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.

If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!

This episode was written by Laura Watkins. Produced by Laura Watkins & Petrit Berisha. Edited by Michael Bailey & Holly Blaxill. Hosted by Sarah Kocianski.

Special Guests: Edward Berks, George Bevis, Megan Cooper, Nadya Hijazi, Oren Greenberg, Paul Bulpitt, and Sam Booth.

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In London, David M. Brear, Simon Taylor, and Sarah Kocianski were our hosts, joined by: Marieke Flament, European Managing Director and CMO of Circle, Simon Vans-Colina, Engineer at Monzo, and Daniel Hegarty, CEO of Habito.

Over in Atlanta, Sam Maule and Doug Bobenhouse are joined by three pairs of guests: Rob Frohwein, CEO of Kabbage and Shannon Johnson, Group President of Financial Institutions at Cardlytics; next up was Kathryn Petralia, COO and Co-Founder of Kabbage, and Andrew Morris, Chief Content Officer at Money20/20; rounding out the show we had Howard Bush, Principal on Industry Experiences and Banking and Capital Markets Lead at Microsoft and Ginger Schmeltzer, Owner and Principal at GDS Advisors, LLC.

Coming on to incredible music and an epic trailer we kick things off with insight into challenger banks. The UK’s digital banks may be profitable sooner than you think Monzo, Starling and Tandem all expect to have hit profitability by 2020 or sooner. The panel examines if Monzo can hit profitability so soon given losses quadrupling recently, Starling's profitability from new revenue streams like business bank accounts and marketplace partnerships, and Tandem acquiring 250K customers since the start of 2018. Next up Starling Bank ditching the purple for a new set of cards, cards for the bank's consumer accounts will be teal, while its business accounts will be turning navy blue. And all cards are portait. Just by like we have Megan Caywood of Starling fame in the audience to show it off.

We move on to Snapchat shutting down Snapcash and giving the space over to Venmo. Snapchat will abandon the peer-to-peer payment space on August 30th. The service was powered by Square Cash. Snapcash gave Snapchat a way to get users to connect payment methods to the app, which were vital to the company’s aim to become a commerce platforms where you can shop without leaving the app. Launched in 2014, ahead of Venmo and Zelle but has ultimately lost customers to both companies. And finally the London team takes a look at what happened to celeb-endorsed cryptocurrencies.

Heading over to Atlanta Doug and Sam kick things off with Rob Frohwein and Shannon Johnson on Uber and Venmo partnering to deliver a new payment experience. The four discuss Uber and Venmo are partnering to deliver a seamless new payment experience available with Uber and Uber Eats. More than 6M payments on Venmo mentioned “Uber” in their description over the past year, how big a deal the partnership is, how important it is that Venmo is offering bank-like solutions without being a bank, and Venmo's security.

Next up, Kathry Petralia and Andrew Morries walk on stage to a great deal of applause, to discuss Facebook Google and others uniting to let customers transfer data between apps. They take a look at whether this is a bonus for start ups, what it means for privacy and data security and why Apple is conspicuously absent from this initiative. Howard Bush and Ginger Schemltzer are on stage next to discuss VISA MoneyGram and Visa Team preparing to deliver real-time global P2P, whether it's a digital and mobile payment option targeting milennials, if cash is still king, why the plan is starting with Mexico and the Philippines and where they'll go next.

And finally the panel takes a look at a woman driving through the streets of South Korea and leaving $14,000 worth of cash in her wake.

All this and so much more on today's very special After Dark episode of Fintech Insider!

Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.

Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com. Find us on Twitter using #AfterDarkVI to get the latest on what’s happened and what people thought.

This episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and Petrit Berisha. Edited by Michael Bailey and Holly Blaxill.

Special Guests: Andrew Morris, Daniel Hegarty, Ginger Schmeltzer, Howard Bush, Kathryn Petralia, Marieke Flament, Rob Frohwein, Shannon Johnson, and Simon Vans-Colina.

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AI is a massive subject that's been so spun out by marketing, consultancies, and project proposals as a cure all that it's become difficult to understand what it actually is. To start things off we define what AI really is so you know your AI fact from fiction, then we move on to how AI has developed from simple 'if and then' statements into the powerful applications of Machine Learning.

We interview Charlie Wood, Principal Consultant at Capco to get an inside look at what's going on in the AI space. He helps break down the myth behind AI and how it's being used today. We also speak to Scott Seely, Principal Solutions Architect at Microsoft to break down how Computer Vision relates to AI and how advanced image recognition capabilities are becoming as well as where chatbots are becoming reliable with language recognition. We also take a look at where AI is being applied in complex use cases and how skeptical experts are about AIs ability to make you money.

Then we take a look at what's going on with AI in financial firms, why AI experts don't want to move into financial services and what needs to be done to make AI a useful product for banks in the future.

This episode was written by Petrit Berisha & Sarah Kocianski. Produced by Petrit Berisha & Laura Watkins. Edited by Holly Blaxill & Michael Bailey. Hosted by Sarah Kocianski.

Debunking the myth of AI was brought to you by Microsoft Azure. If you’d like to find out more how they could help you out leverage your existing systems for much more head on over to microsoft.11fs.com

Special Guests: Charlie Wood and Scott Seely.

Sponsored By:

• Microsoft Azure

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Ross and David sit down with Eric Fulwiler, Executive Director of VaynerMedia and Teana Baker-Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer of Coinfloor. The group discuss the latest news hitting the fintech space this week, including:

Challenger bank fury over delays to RBS funding scheme, Revolut reported suspected money laundering, EU wants more competition in fintech, Klarna’s payment card, M-Pesa looks to Ethiopia for expansion, Paypal invests in cross border payments, Payment rules create $1bn in losses for Chinese giants, and Kodak’s bitcoin rigs have had their moment as well as many more stories.

We kick things off with challenger banks getting angry over the extended delays to RBS' £775M fund to boost competition in the small business banking market. Payouts have been delayed due to failure to make senior hires on time.

Next up we move on to the news that Revolut discovering a spate of money laundering on its digital payments system. There are huge implications from a KYC perspective, after HSBC were basically deemed complicit in Mexican money laundering after its KYC was deemed too lax. The panel discusses what this might mean for Revolut especially in regards to their application for a banking license and the larger reputational impact for fintech in general. Then the panel moves on to the EU pushing for more competition in the fintech space. Is the international body behind the times and making unfair assumptions of the industry? How can fintech be more competitive and how old does fintech have to be before it starts to count? The panel discusses all these things and has some interesting takes on the issue.

Moving on to better news for the fintech industry, Klarna is launching a payment card and is preparing for expansion. Klarna’s 2,000 workers have been divided into 250 teams, each focusing on a specific problem for customers and how to solve it. Does this prove that digital is a small team sport? Klarna also faces difficulties breaking into the US and UK, two countries with little history of consumers paying by invoices. So, the question remains, can Klarna make headway in the UK? And calling back to the previous story, the panel examines whether this is creating competition within EU fintech.

Speaking of expansions, M-Pesa looks to move in to Ethiopia. Could M-Pesa transform the Ethiopian economy in the same way as it has in Kenya? The panel discusses the state of fintech in the country which has no transference options in place at all and 'archaic' systems are ready for reform to help the economy. Tieing in seamlessly to the story, the panel looks at Paypal investing in cross border payments with P-PRO, a cross border payment platform for merchants looking to accept payments from other countries. The panel discuss why PayPal is investing so heavily in the payments space, if anyone previously heard of P-PRO, and how it compares to Mastercard enlisting Worldpay to push Vocalink's Pay by Bank app.

Staying international, the panel next looks at losses in revenue from payment rules from the People's Bank of China. Chinese giants Alibaba and Tencent have lost $1BN thanks to these rules, but is $1BN a big deal to Alibaba and Tencent? Is 1.7% of revenue a big loss when your businesses move trillions of dollars? Is this move by the PBOC unprecedented, and is it likely to be rolled out anywhere else? Moving on to the tailend of the show, a scheme to rent out Kodak-branded bitcoin mining rigs has collapsed. The company, Spotlite, has had the scheme blocked by the US financial watchdog. This follows from the scheme being dubbed a scam by some critics, it's worth noting that Kodak and Spotlite had claimed customers would make $375 a month from the rigs but forgotten that mining Bitcoin becomes more difficult over time.

And finally, Prime Day technicial issues resulted in a Prime Fail from 3pm EST when moments beforehand reports came in that Amazon's website wasn't working. Amazon issued a statement to say they were working on it at 5PM and instead of deals people were shown pictures of dogs looking sad. Customers missed out on deals, baskets were unexpectedly emptied and the “view deals” UX was taking people on an endless loop.

All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!

Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.

Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com

This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill.

Special Guests: Eric Fulwiler and Teana Baker-Taylor.

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Some people think it's lucky to be able to make decisions, but Howard Lindzon doesn't see things that way. It's about practice, not being paralysed by indecision and limiting your options to two positive outcomes and then picking the one that you're able to live with. You've gotta keep moving forward and to keep everyone around you motivated and wanting to move forward.

CEOs are vital to the nature of a startup, they need to be able to pull their company in the direction they want to grow in as fast as they can and keep everyone who's with them excited and interested. Sam and Howard also discuss how not everyone can be a great CEO but that isn't a bad thing. The world needs great second-in-commands and people all down the hierarchy, without them there'd be no companies.

Being a CEO means being a great recruiter and communicator in addition to raising money. You can't just be good at one of them, all three are vital to being a CEO. It's important to ensure staff know what you need them to be doing, when, and most importantly, why.

Angel investors are focused on creating the best possible team for the company, finding the specialists who are capable of operating in the space like a scalpel because they know what they're good at, how to do it, and are solely focused on getting their tasks done. And most importantly, trusting the others to achieve what they need to do too.

We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.

If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!

This episode was produced by Ollie Judge and edited by Michael Bailey.

Special Guest: Howard Lindzon.

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Sarah and Simon sit down with Editor in Chief of Computer Weekly, Bryan Glick, Business Development at Bud, Nina Mohanty, and 11:FS Pulse Analyst, James Safford. The panel discuss the latest news hitting the fintech space this week, including:

Google Pay rolls out support for peer-to-peer payments and mobile ticketing, Zimbabwe's eco-cash two day crash exposes the vulnerabilities of going cashless, MasterCard suffering a glitch to Faster Payments with many payments delayed, TSB customers suffer yet again after an app update locked out users; Nordnet fire AI assistant Amelia after a poor performance review, Neobank Space was made in just 8 months, Open Banking is 6 months old and what it's achieved.

And finally, of course, death is no reason for breaking the rules according to Paypal.

All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!

Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.

Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com

This week's episode was produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Michael Bailey.

Special Guests: Bryan Glick, James Safford, and Nina Mohanty.

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COBOL is a programming language that was ubiquitous to the programming world around 60 years ago. It's since been replaced by newer and more useful languages. Unfortunately, COBOL still underpins a great deal of the banking technology in the world, but no-one's trained in it. This has left to a rise in the number of 60-80 year olds who have come out of retirement to maintain the modern banking world. Cowboys who can do what they want because they're the ones maintaining current banking technology. We take a look at what happened to lead us to this point and interview Ewan Silver, CTO of 11:FS to shed some light on the issue.

Next up we interview Scott Seely, Principal Solutions Architect at Microsoft. He runs us through the complex process of untangling legacy systems to work with new technology and hopefully escape the COBOL cowboys. People are the main sticking point here, so Microsoft have come up with an ingenious solution to enable the financial industry to work with legacy systems while still engaging with the most modern technology and making APIs a much smaller sticking point by extending legacy systems out to them.

We also take a look at the AI problem. It's no secret that the industry has been going wrong with AI for a while now, using it in meetings to get budgets approved or used as a distance promise of results when numbers are flagging. We examine where the industry is making mistakes with AI.

This episode was written by Ollie Judge. Produced by Petrit Berisha & Laura Watkins. Edited by Holly Blaxill and hosted by Simon Taylor.

Legacy to Cloud was brought to you by Microsoft Azure. If you’d like to find out more how they could help you out leverage your existing systems for much more head on over to microsoft.11fs.com

Special Guests: Charlie Wood, Ewan Silver, and Scott Seely.

Sponsored By:

• Microsoft Azure

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Sarah and David sit down with Forbes and The Economist journalist, Monty Munford, and CEO of Onfido, Husayn Kassai. The panel discuss the latest news hitting the fintech space this week. Including:

TSB could have up to $150m in debt after their IT systems meltdown back in April - the team discuss whether this amount is accurate (or indeed, even enough); Monzo's losses quadruple in 2017 - but is this in line with what our panel expected?

They also take a look at the FCA's latest cohort for their 4th sandbox, their review into “unfair fees” and yet another massive data breach, from a data broker no one has heard of.

We even have two "and finally" stories this week as we couldn't decide between them: Goldman Sachs is getting into EDM and rapper Big Sean raps about crypto on his latest album - has it finally gone mainstream?!

All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!

Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast.

Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com

Special Guests: Husayn Kassai and Monty Munford.

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Today's insights show brings together how everything in the UK fintech space is working together to improve the industry.

We want to talk about how the whole nation can start talking about fintech, share knowledge, and work together in unity. But is it even possible in a nation with such strong individual identities?

Fantastic insights are given by fintech experts who are working across the UK to bring fintech to those who need it most:

We hope you enjoyed the show! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook.

If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them!

Special Guests: Anna Wallace, Ben Brabyn, Chris Pond, Debs Harding, Gregoire Michel, John Glen, Jon Bradford, Katia Lang, Lisa Wood, Martin Cook, Paul Rippon, and Wendy Jephson.

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