In this special 2023 Scotland Fintech Festival episode we spoke with Mike Teall, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Scottish fintech Snugg and Adam Betteridge, Partnerships and Open Banking Lead at TSB.

We discussed TSB Innovation Labs that saw Snugg secure a partnership with TSB, helping the bank's customer make their homes greener.

We focus specifically on what makes for a good collaboration between established financial firms and fintechs.

Scotland Fintech Festival took place between the 21st of September and the 12th of October. With over 50 events the festival was a real success this time again.

During the launch event, the Fintech Summit, we recorded special episodes in collaboration with collaboration platform Findr.

In this episode we speak with Nicola Anderson, CEO at Fintech Scotland about the festival itself as well as initiatives that are underway, delivering the recommendations of the UK Research & Innovation Roadmap.

Lending money is a process that has long been around and for many years it was left undisrupted. People are very familiar now with credit scores and the idea that to get credit you need credit.

New solutions and technologies are coming to disrupt this market to make financial products more accessible to a greater number of people.

In this episode we’ll look at how Open Finance is changing the status quo and look at some fantastic examples of fintech innovation.

We’ll also look at how credit bureaus are adapting and partnering with fintechs to evolve their own models.

Guests: 

Robert McKechnie – Head of Products at Equifax

Crawford Taylor – CEO and Founder at Nude

By Now Pay Later is not something new. Offline, it’s a process that goes back several decades. Online we’ve started to see offers develop in the last 10 years with a real acceleration powered by fintech innovation in the last 5 years.

In the UK this market represents $27Bn and is expected to reach $55Bn by 2028 according to Payments Cards and Mobile.

Recently we’ve started to witness the appearance of what’s called BNPL 2.0.

According to CU today 61% of BNPL users would rather use a BNPL service offered directly from the merchant they’re buying from than go through a third party.

In this episode we’ll be speaking about BNPL2.0 and wonder if this is in fact the future, its advantages and pitfalls

Guests: 

Geordie Laing – Head of Partnerships at Zing Cover

Thomas Bull – Partner at EY and Head of Fintech Growth

On November 10th, 2022, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) was approved by the EU.

It is designed to standardise IT risk requirements in the financial sector to ensure that all participants of the financial system are subject to a common set of. 

Amongst other things it introduces an oversight framework for critical third-party providers.

In this podcast we will discuss how this new EU regulation can impact fintech firms that are very often providing 3rd party services to established financial firms.

Guests:

Yvonne Dunn, Partner at Pinsent Masons

Wayne Scott, Regulatory Compliance Solutions Lead at NCC

Jamie Graves, technical advisor on the TrueDeploy project

In this special episode with speak with David Tracy, Head of Data Science, at Smart Data Foundry on the week they presented their new Aisle proposition at Innovate Finance Global Summit.

What is synthetic data is? How is it different from real-world data?

We'll explore how it will speed up innovation and collaboration in the fintech world, what the risks and benefits are and much more.

David will also speak to us about the work they've done with the FCA and the PSR to tackle APP fraud using Agent Based Simulation.

Scaling up a fintech business is a crucial part of a company’s life, moving from launching and validating a proposition to growing, onboarding clients and driving revenue. At that stage companies will focus on marketing, sales, recruitment which are all important considerations. It is however paramount to also look at resilience to protect customers/clients, adhere to new regulation, be investor ready and navigate procurement better and faster.

In this podcast we will explore what being resilient mean. We’ll cover cyber resilience of course but will go much wider and look at how to build a solid and future proof business. 

Guests: 

Wayne Scott – Regulatory Compliance Solutions Lead

David Lanc – Founder and CEO at Ionburst

In July 2022, the FCA published its Consumer Duty. Regulated firms need to implement the new rules by the end of July 2023 for open products and July 2024 for closed books of business.

Firms will need to review their products, communications and customer journey.

It will impact most areas in those organisations such as governance, reporting, product design, pricing, distribution, servicing and staff training.

In this podcast we will review the key principles, ask ourselves what the impact on both established firms and fintechs is as well as exploring innovative technologies that can help adhere to those new rules.

Guests:

Venetia Jackson – Senior Associate at Pinsent Masons

Joseph Twigg – Founder and CEO at Aveni

Chris Ansara – Founder and CEO at docStribute

When thinking about payroll generally most people would assume that it is something that works well. You work, you get paid. However, payroll is being disrupted like never before.

According to software company Intuit, one in four workers say they have had paycheque errors. And cloud company Kronos found almost half of workers who have had two or more paycheque errors will look for a new job.

Society is changing fast (even more so after COVID). In this podcast we’ll explore how those changes are impacting the way people work, get paid, pay taxes and how new fintech solutions are developing to make this possible.

Guests:

Ian Hogg – Chairman of The Work Tech Group that owns fastPAYE

Hayley Strachan - Director - Global Employer Services at Deloitte

Richard Tooth - Tax & Legal consultant at Deloitte LLP

Eira Hammond - Executive Director Global Payroll at Hi55 Ventures

The FinTech Scotland Research and Innovation Roadmap highlighted the growing focus on climate considerations for the financial services sector.

Whilst this is in part driven by consumers, demanding better transparency for the products they invest in, this is the launch of new regulations that is accelerating the move to a more sustainable financial sector.

Financial services providers are facing growing challenges around ESG reporting due to the difficulties around the availability of trustworthy data. This has led to mounting concerns around greenwashing.

In a bid to clamp down on greenwashing, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is proposing a package of new measures including investment product sustainability labels and restrictions on how terms like ‘ESG’, ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ can be used.

In this podcast we discuss how to best avoid greenwashing moving forward.

Guests:

Colin Carmichael – Sustainability Director at PwC

Jules Salmond – Founder at Ciendos

Matthew Brander - Senior Lecturer in Carbon Accounting at The University of Edinburgh Business School