As always there is a fascinating phenomenon when the globalised world of tech meets the localised worlds of custom, people, rules and regulations. As recently as LFP243 we dived in to the world of tech as a whole in Berlin and today we dive into Fintech in France. Needless to say France is a massive market, well banked and a real venue for Fintech. That having been said there are, as always, some downsides. In this episode we have a fascinating historical, philosophical and very practical conversation about the nature of Fintech in France.

Louis is well-placed to discuss these matters being not only a co-founder of Hokodo which is based in Paris and has more than 100 staff, most of whom are in London.

Furthermore he is very multicultural in a European sense having been brought up as first a German speaker in Champagne and then Strasbourg in Alsace which looks both east and west, not least of which as it has been part of Germany and of France at varying times. He moved from there to Paris and describes the Paris-isation of French students and the de-regionalisation process they go through. Furthermore he has worked in Switzerland – also rather Franco-German as well as the UK. Thus who better to lay out the pros and cons of Fintech in France?

Topics discussed include:

• regional accents and dialects and the trend over time to create one language at the expense of the regional variants

And much much more

In this episode we take the opportunity to talk to one of the most credit risk experienced men in Fintech who has ranged from a dozen years at seminal Capital One through managing Barclay’s £40 bn portfolio, being CRO at Funding Circle to now founding his own Fintech to mechanise further short term SME liquidity financing, Jerome’s stats are that banks automate roughly 5% of this type of lending whereas he believes the vast majority to be automatable.

We discuss what credit risk is in the age of data, automation and Fintechs and dive into the multiplicity of models used in a credit pipeline not just for risk but for wider business management and portfolio management purposes as well as looking at the parameters of automation versus human input. We also look at Jerome’s experience of what is stable about the models value and what is not over significant economic dislocations.

Importantly there are a huge range of uses of credit models above and beyond the simple case of credit risk and Jerome gives us a flavour of these across his own career – a fascinating stat being the incarnation which had 25 models in operation :-!

Topics discussed include:

• Jerome’s background in the Art world as well as Banking world

And much much more

This 2024 New Year Special forms the sixth and final in a series of six (there will be no more) about how technology – and in this episode way wider forces – are changing us directly for the better (read huge software upgrades) in order to overcome, in a velvet revolution, empowered tyrants.

I said in last years 2023 New Year Special that “It is by far the most ambitious, empowering and positive of all suggesting that we use the insanity as a spur in our sides to seek to flee Plato’s cave, escape the Matrix and speed up our path to awakening in search of love, light and healing.”

Well this one jumps that shark and sets out to empower us all to not just be in search of “love and laughter, song and dance” but to create it via giving us perhaps the deepest podcast dive ever (from conventional reality to well beyond) into what creativity is and how we can amplify it manyfold.

How much of today’s, at a narrow level, tech was unknown a century ago? Imagine how much tech in a century from now is unknown today. How do we become explorers of the unknown and make it known?

It has seven sections:

1. A Recap of the Series of Six LFP Specials to date

There is a huge shift in consciousness going on now. The old world is dying in front of our eyes. However a new world is arising and there are a phenomenal number of green shoots growing for those who will look and see.

Let us take a journey from disenchantment and toxic metapolitics, and a world that was going down not up  way before the globalists started boiling frogs. to a world of re-enchantment and the most noble of missions, playing our part in designing a world that will be a tribute to us and a blessing to not just our offspring but humanity as a whole.

To create the New World we need to dive deep into the well of creativity and bring up a bucket of fresh water. May this episode inspire you to understand your innate, your divine if your prefer, powers of creativity and their infinite potential.

We all live – or are imprisoned – in the world of the known and the assumed.

Creativity and the three tools we examine in this episode (plus for the racey an additional angle to turbocharge personal creativity and life) is the ONLY way in which we ever change anything.

Creativity unlocks the door that traps us in the super-finite known, in the matrix, in Plato’s Cave and releases us to explore that vaaast world which is the unexplored world of the unknown. 

Do not think that, as you are just a drop of water, this means you are of no significance. Rather remember that a bucket of water left out in the rain gets filled by nothing other than drops of rain. 

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In this Xmas special we zoom out from Fintech to Tech as a whole in one of Europe’s coolest capitals – Berlin. Ivan is a great person to guide us through the scene having spent many years in the Ur-tech hub of San Francisco/Silicon Valley. This also means that he understands both the outsiders perspective on Berlin tech as well as now an experienced and well informed insider.

Ivan honestly lays out both the highs and the lows of being in Tech in Berlin – the good news and the challenges and the somewhat insane (see below) – that he has encountered with his embedded financial infrastructure startup Monite.

A particularly insane quirk of German law is the need to get documents notarised. Ok well so no big deal eh? Well not as such however if you for example do a raise then the notary takes a percentage of the value raised for (a) reading the whole document out to you in German (even if you do not speak German!) and (b) notarising that “yeh he signed it”.

Topics discussed include:

• historical contexts of Germany, a very young country, and Berlin

And much much more

Saudi Arabia is a country that increasingly confounds stereotypes and expectations – an example being a YouTuber who has visited every country in the world choosing it for his honeymoon. At the same time it has undergone a phenomenal journey literally in a lifetime from a very low economic standard of living to super-high. As a result, like China, it shares the “relatively blank canvas from which to start Finteching” but equally has it’s own unique issues notably eg in a country with centuries of little wealth and suddenly (on average) excess savings culture and the likes of pension provision are very distinct – or perhaps lacking.

Naif has had a wide and varied career before starting Hakbah a collective savings platform Fintech. Interestingly talking about different social models worldwide P2P was focusing in this “modern” “Western” way on the individual as the “unit of social currency” [and in passing re zeitgeist then became institutionalised on one side (the lending side) and then most became banks). Collective savings were A Big Thing in say the UK for some time where regionally folks would pool savings for others to get mortgages in “Building” (sic) societies. They remain A Big Thing in a still at heart traditional Arabian/Islamic culture.

In this show we dive into some historical and geographical aspects of Saudi Arabia – the 5th largest by land mass in the world in passing. Thence the unique aspects of Fintech in Saudi – one of which is a very rapid pace of development and another a very government-sponsored approach – and finally collective savings in more depth.

Topics discussed include:

• the geography of Saudi Arabia – unique features and aspects one might not expect

And much much more

Why buy alternative assets? Well in extremis what else would you buy?

Back in the 70s getting mortgages took months – there was a mortgage queue (&before techies get over-excited about how “bad” this was it was one of the factors restraining insane bull markets in residential property). Fast forward and the median mortgage in the UK is granted in 19 business days which is still a long time to wait given the stresses associated with the UK legal structure of buying a house. MPowered Mortgages, a regulated mortgage lender in the UK, have reduced this to a median of 3 days to make a decision and are aiming in the next 18mts to make half of those done in a few hours.

Stuart is the CEO of MPowered (and its sister company MQube seller of AI products into regulated industries more globally) and guides us through this astonishing outperformance. Like many a hardcore Fintech founder he has a long history in FS behind him having been CEO of several banks in Asia for Lloyds Bank for many years.

Even so this is no mean achievement as Stuart himself found out recently when he needed a mortgage but – under the “rules” – was not allowed to use his own company to borrow from.

Topics discussed include:

• Stuarts recent experience of buying a house and getting a mortgage

The speed of change is super-rapid and nowhere more than in payments where advance rapidly leapfrogs advance. For the past two years “orchestration” has been The Thing (see eg LFP213 a deep dive into that topic). However now we have the latest greatest kid on the block the idea of curation. If orchestration solved the challenge of the techies namely replacing many APIs with one – a natural leap forwards – it did not solve the businesses challenges with negotiating a whole bunch of biparty arrangements contract et al. Curation promises to fix all that by creating a single counterparty – the curator – as an intermediary.

Aran has a super-impressive long track-record in the payments industry and his latest venture – Paytrix – has impressive backers such as Bain Capital and raised some $18m for an A Series in a tough time for tech raises.

Bootstrapping to be a Tier 1 counterparty is not simple matter and Aran guides us through not just what the curation model is but also the challenges of not slowly walking up the mountain to the heights but getting there super-rapidly.

Topics discussed include:

And much much more

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The world is quite a large place but who better to cover the situation and trend in real-time payments than Craig Ramsey Head of Global Real Time Payments at ACI Worldwide who process around a billion payments per day with total value in the trillions of dollars. In this episode we dive into real time payments in the UK, Europe, the US and within the BRICS as well as talking about the next challenge – namely smooth interconnection of local real time payments networks.

Craig has getting on for 40 yrs experience of payments including having started as a Cobol programmer. He has been at ACI since 2000 and has thus seen a very long time horizon on this topic as well as being involved in managing and planning future real time payments programs worldwide.

The topic certainly turned out to be one that was more fascinating than I had previously realised with many moving parts.

Topics discussed include:

And much much more

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Scaling any successful technology firm (who can expand so much faster than ~”bricks and mortar” firms) involves considerable challenges. These challenges are only compounded by challenges with surrounding infrastructure which, shall we say, aren’t even around the world. What may be taken for granted in the world’s leading tech hubs may be conspicuously absent in many territories. Thus in many ways scaling in emerging markets is the real stress test for an entrepreneurs ability to overcome challenges, internal and external.

Tosin is founder and CEO of Moniepoint, who provide banking platforms, Africa’s largest fintech by transaction volume ($170bn pa) and were recently ranked the second-fastest growing company in Africa by the Financial Times. Based in Lagos Nigeria Tosin has had more than the average entrepreneurs share of challenges dealing not just with scaling a company but scaling it where the ecosystem isn’t entirely ideal.

Topics discussed include:

And much much more

Share and enjoy!