315. News: Tech for Tech’s Sake

Apr 22, 2019

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This week we have some great stories for you as Sarah and Simon are joined by a couple of great guests:

Freddy Kelly, CEO and co-founder at Credit Kudos
Ben Gleisner, CEO and Co-founder at CoGo
Simon Vans-Colina, Engineer at Monzo

We kick off the episode by taking a look at US lenders preparing for a recession. U.S. online lenders such as LendingClub Corp, Kabbage Inc and Avant LLC are scrutinizing loan quality, securing long-term financing and cutting costs, as executives prepare for what they fear could be the sector’s first economic downturn. We hear from our Americas MD, Sam Maule for a US perspective (:).

Next up, we talk about RBS challenging the challengers with Bo. Despite buying NatWest almost 20 years ago RBS still uses different IT systems at the two banks. Bó, their new digital-only consumer bank in contrast, has been built in a little over a year on a completely new cloud-based system. It will launch to the public later this year. Sarah and Simon VC remark that if Bo are happy to be a companion bank account, the data can't be fully representatives of their customers' finances. Simon T thinks that profitability is at least a five year journey - is the importance of profit early on misguided? (:).