Payments orchestration is all the rage. But what is it, and amidst all the hype is it all it’s cracked up to be? Good questions and who better to ask than serial entrepreneur Kristian who founded Cellpoint Digital back in 2007 to do precisely what became known today as payments orchestration and indeed their website says they are the global leader in it. Thus Cellpoint have the claim to not only be the first to do orchestration but to do it before it existed and to chart the convergence and confluence of multiple factors which have made it the complex beast it is today.

The origins of the whole payments value-adding by third parties came about as having a global business means having to handle global payments. And this involves multiple banks in many countries, many regulatory regimes, many currencies and people travelling around as well as buying online,

Not only this but there is a whole back office set of processes behind all this ensuring that the money that you expect when someone “paid” actually ends up going kerching in your bank account in the right amount at a later date. Not only is there this saving money on managing and processing payments for merchants but what was to become orchestration evolved into more pro-active ways of actually increasing merchants cashflow – we are well beyond the world of the late 90s when smart money realised a red button would get more clicks than a green one. As we hear Big Merchants do payments orchestration as they can get an over 10% increase in $$$ inflowing. Wow… :-O

Kristian leads us through these thickets in the clear and methodical way that you might expect form someone who has spent 14 years watching this scene slowly develop.

Topics discussed include:

• Denmark and orientation/identification versus the content and Scandinavia

Africa in general narratives is all too often treated – like many matters – as a super-low-res jpeg, more as if it were a place, one which is complex and widely misunderstood, or not even understood. Africa is, of course, in reality it is a vast continent of a billion people, over 50 countries and countless different languages and peoples. Africa has fractal complexity. Zoom in  at any level and you find even more complexity – whether geography, peoples, languages, history, governance, development (from hunter-gatherers to Chinese railways faster than any in the UK) or, as we shall see Fintech where with M-Pesa formed in 2007 Africa has been one of the global leaders in Fintech per se. In LFP210 we discussed the fact that its largest country, Nigeria, has not just three main tribes but another 180 peoples and languages. In terms of physical size it takes less time to fly from London to Cairo than it does from Lagos to Cape Town.

This makes covering Africa from an investment perspective extremely challenging in all aspects. In this excellent tour d’horizon long established techster Gbenga, born in Nigeria and now working for Global VCs QED investors as their African head of Fintech investment  joins us to literally lay out the landscape and explain to us how one even approaches such a vast and varied territory in terms of finding key focal markets – five in QED’s case – to firstly invest in and secondly act as hubs for spokes to other local markets.

Finally away from all simplistic narratives it should be noted that QED has a global fund – the corollary of which is at the highest level – QED are simply trying to find Fintechs that are great per se with no allowance or bias towards or against region, merely trying to find great founders and great businesses.

Topics discussed include:

• we start with a little dip into the fractal nature of history; the fractal complexity of European imperialism – it was never one thing; ranging from eg at one end the insane and evil rule of King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo to the British West African abolishing slavery. Zoom into even the British “Empire” and one finds that it was not a thing but was rather a collection of dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories with very different governance structures and structures from self-rule, to direct-rule to indirect-rule

And much much more

Incumbent banks – as Fintech has found in the past decade are rather safer from having huge slices of their business nicked than many Fintechs have imagined. However Allica Bank, established by some pretty experienced individuals have a plan. In this episode we dive into that plan along with quizzing Conrad, who was last on the show as Founder/CEO of Funding Options on what the pros and cons of being a past Founder/CEO are – a little discussed topic.

We also take a look at the SME market and its three main components – micro-businesses which are somewhat private-client like, medium sized businesses and then what are effectively small corporates.

Once again we get a great example that any word, any labeling of a category – whether it be Fintech, Africa (coming soon) or SME is not really a thing but a handle on a series of things – which of course themselves can be further zoomed-into.

Topics discussed include:

• Crossrail/the Elizabeth line as fast and efficient from Canary Wharf to the City – at a minor cost of £19bn to build and many years behind schedule

• 5 million micro-businesses

And much much more!

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Africa is one of the lynchpins of Fintech’s origins – key origins being Zopa’s invention of P2P borrowing/lending in 2005 and mPesa’s mobile money+ in 2007. In this episode we take a look at more recent innovation in Nigeria, Africa’s largest country with a population of over 200 million. Piggyvest who launched in 2016 and whose only round to date was a $1.8m seed now have an amazing 4 million customers saving and investing via their app. In 2021 alone, the platform paid out over $582 million to its users

In this jolly episode (we could do with an injection of Nigerian positivity and humour in Europe right now) Odun, co-founder and COO,  guides us through an introduction to Nigeria, her entrepreneurial career and the background to Piggyvest, the seminal role of a wooden box (!) as well as the future.

Africa in a world beset by American “wokism” is all too often seen at an insanely low resolution as if it were a place rather than a continent of a billion people and some 50+countries. We will cover Fintech in Africa per se in an upcoming episode but first we start with no generalisations just an great tale of entrepreneurship and a prime example of how the digital revolution in FS is worldwide, needing just the right amount of tinder and entrepreneurial spark to enable better deals for not just  the over-served global zilllionaires but for every smaller sums of money – in Piggyvest’s case one can save and invest from as little as 20 US cents.

Topics discussed include:

• the three main peoples of Nigeria – Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa and their geographical distributions

And much much more

Chargebacks – the ability to retrieve your money from your bank spent when spent via a card in case of dissatisfaction after a purchase and an inability to resolve the situation with the seller – are one of those rare items that affects everyone from consumer through to merchant and including naturally the financial system in between. As we shall here they are super-complicated in reality.

Monica Eaton first came across the challenge of chargebacks way back in 2008 when she had an online retail business but was naive about them and learned the hard way. However she resolved to understand the situation better and conducted extensive research into why she had been suffering from so many chargebacks which led to a website labeling over 100 reasons for them that retailers might be able to avoid, The Force was definitely with her as within a very short space of time major media outlets and retailers wanted to know more and interview/consult with her. Fast forward to today and the company she founded to take this further – Chargebacks911 – now has some 400 staff in four offices around the world and have successfully protected over 10 billion online transactions recovering an astonishing $1bn+ for their clients.

Topics discussed include:

• cool in Seattle, steamy in Tampa and hot in London

And much much more

Many founders establish businesses and only later realise they are hard to fund. Others aim to create “fundable businesses” yet lack the passion for a long journey. Somewhere along the spectrum is a happy medium which must be balanced along the growth curve as phases change and different types of funders come and go. In this episode serial entrepreneur Dileep Thazhmon, fresh from raising a $180m C round navigates us through this territory and describes how the balance is always changing.

Jeeves (tryjeeves.com) help businesses organise all employee expenses under one unified platform which includes flexible funding in multiple currencies. As their slogan says “built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs”.

They have over 3,000 clients in over 20 countries which is a phenomenal achievement given that the business only opened to its first customer in 2021 :-!

Topics discussed include:

• the renaissance happening in Miami and Florida as a whole as a centre for business

• Team

And much much more

The Fintech wave spreads ever wider – and in the case of retail financial markets as Nicky puts it if you can buy a book at midnight why can’t you buy a share? It’s a good example of how the digital paradigm has changed customer expectations and oldskool ideas about limited “market hours” – there of course for the convenience of the suppliers not the customer – carry little weight.

Equally becoming a marketplace is no trivial task, which is why we have seen so few Fintechs attempt it. Spectrum Markets is a wholly owned yet separate subsidiary of the IG Group and so this episode offers us an opportunity to discuss a dual topic – not just retail markets but how incumbents should structure being able to host revolution as well as evolution.

So in this show Nicky guides us through several years of attempting both to revolutionise financial markets whilst attempting to do this with both the strengths and the challenges of a major incumbent.

Topics discussed include:

• biscuits and sugar…

And much much more

Financial services – whether mainstream or alternative – depend entirely on Trust – trust that the pieces of paper and coins in your pocket will be taken in exchange for goods (no longer 100% true), trust that a piece of plastic in your wallet will “tap and pay”, trust that you do “own” those securities a website says you do etc etc. However Trust is at a real premium right now and indeed ever since 2008. Who can you trust with your wealth? The State? Central Banks? Banks? The dollar? Sterling? The Euro? Stockmarkets? Your pensions? Crypto? “Stablecoins”?

In this episode Omid, a decade-long veteran of the crypto world who as well as lecturing on said same at the Columbia Business School is the author of “The Story of the Blockchain: A Beginner’s Guide” which gets an impressive 4.5* from 82 reviews on Amazon. He is also the author of his upcoming “Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms”.

So we dive into the nature of Trust per se – how that has worked, or not, how it is underwritten in the FS system, how it works in crypto and how the existing system and crypto might coalesce/crash together with CBDCs.

Unless you have precious metals in your hand the shocking truth is that all of your wealth is dependent on “the system” and trust in that so this is a core topic.

Topics discussed include:

• booking holidays back in the day as well as now and what this tells us about the false promise of a digital world as well as choice theory

And much much more

Over time the Fintech wave reaches ever more complex topics. FX per se was one of the earlier low-hanging fruits to be digitised – a simple, near immediate transaction that everyone understands as they do it all the time when going on holidays. However its taken much longer – a decade or perhaps two – for Fintech to touch the more challenging topic of hedging. Hedging is far more challenging as it is one that even FX professionals find challenging to decide upon/recommend. I think this angle is best summed up by the adage “one mans adage is another mans position” – history is replete with examples where so-called hedges turned into actual positions in all sorts of markets.

It is into this challenging area that serial entrepreneur Seth Phillips is taking Bound “a digital FX broker built for the 21st century” who are looking at ways to make FX hedging available in much lower ticket sizes than MegaBanks find it profitable to deal.

As we discuss in this show it is not just the classic case of an SME who have expenses in one currency and revenues in another – with both being uncertain – that is affected by this. Many startups might have for example dollar funding of capital but operate say in the UK in sterling. FX is very volatile these days and swings of 10% or so can easily flip a company from profit into loss. But traditionally many SMEs faced with the complexity of hedging and inaccessibility of hedging products end up taking this unwanted and hedgable risk. In a world where there are plenty of business risks that they are voluntarily running adding an additional unwanted risk is not ideal.

Topics discussed include:

• Seth’s growing up in a Mormon world and his fascinating personal journey therefrom including some years in Helsinki

And much much more

“P2P”, invented by Zopa in 2005, was one of the main unique business models that was at the core of the early success of Fintech businesses in disintermediating banks and offering better/cheaper/faster experiences to both lenders and borrowers. Over the past nearly two decades  P2Ps have had many fates – variously succeeding, going bust, committing fraud, listing, being sold and transforming into banks . 

In this episode we dive into the lessons learned from this history with Jaidev Zopa’s CEO who oversaw the transformation of Zopa from a pure P2P model to one mixed with banking and then more recently dropping P2P altogether.

What lessons can be drawn from the whole experiment? What worked well and what did not? What was it in the end. what set of circumstances, that led the firm that originated the whole idea to abandon it?

In this conversation Jaidev and I discuss the two-decade arc from both our perspectives from P2P not existing, through P2P existed but we didn’t know of it, through to hearing about it and initial reactions with a deeper dive into Jaidev’s years starting in 2014 first as COO and then as the CEO who drove the recent changes in business model.

We end with reflections on not just in what ways is the current Zopa different but also in what ways is it the same? One may change an engine in a car without affecting the car’s appearance, appeal and indeed destinations it drives to.

• what a crisis in domestic banking amounted to in the 1970s

• badly-run to fraudulent P2Ps leading to platform failures which damaged the sectors reputation

And much much more