Rebank: Fintech Analysis

Dan Ramsden is the Chief Financial and Strategy Officer of StockTwits. StockTwits is a social media platform designed for sharing ideas between investors, analysts and traders. Founded in 2009, the company has been called one of the "50 best websites" by Time Magazine and one of the "top 10 most innovative companies in finance" by FastCompany. StockTwits has 3 million monthly active users, who spend an astonishing 51 minutes per day on the platform, on average. I thought this conversation was fascinating. Dan is an extremely insightful and eloquent guy with broad intellectual interests and years of experience in markets. The discussion covers a range of topics, including network effects, the impacts of the real-time, free flow of information, behavioral economics and social networks and human nature. Connect with us on Twitter @rebankpodcast or on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube. If you like today's episode, please subscribe on iTunes, or your podcast platform of choice, and leave us a review. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Dan Ramsden.

This episode is different. It's part of a conversation I had with three smart and experienced entrepreneurs and thinkers, who all happen to work in fintech. Maybe I'll released the extended version of the discussion at some point, but today I wanted to focus on a part of it. Artificial intelligence and automation are becoming powerful forces of change in the world today, and the impacts of these technologies will shape the next few decades at least. Charlie Delingpole is the Founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage, a data company leveraging machine learning to identify bad actors and feed that information to bank anti money laundering and compliance teams to prevent crime. Ricky Knox is the Founder and CEO of Tandem, a UK bank using data to provide personalized financial guidance to customers, and Lex Sokolin, the former Founder and CEO of NestEgg Wealth, a roboadvisor that was acquired by AdvisorEngine in 2014. Currently, Lex runs the emerging tech business for Autonomous Research, a buy-side research firm. Lex and his team recently published an excellent deep dive on artificial intelligence, which is available at: https://next.autonomous.com/augmented-finance-machine-intelligence. Lex also publishes one of the best fintech newsletters, which you can subscribe to at: http://bit.ly/autonomousnext. We pick the conversation up in full swing. Buckle your seatbelts, it gets serious fast. I'm going to publish an accompanying article with a number of the talking points that inspired this discussion at www.bankingthefuture.com/artificialintelligence. I'd love to share more of these types of conversations, from meet ups and private events and the like, if people find them interesting. Let me know what you think on Twitter @rebankpodcast or by email at will.beeson@bankingthefuture.com. The first voice you hear after mine is Lex's, followed by Charlie's and then Ricky's. Thanks very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Lex Sokolin, Charlie Delingpole and Ricky Knox.

Robin Tombs is a serial tech entrepreneur and investor. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Yoti, a digital identity platform enabling secure onboarding anywhere online or in-person. Prior to Yoti, Robin co-founded Gamesys, one of the world's leading online gaming operators. He is also an angel investor in a handful of technology companies and a trustee of Future First. Today's conversation is a fascinating glimpse into what the future of data, privacy and identity might look like. Connect with us on Twitter @rebankpodcast or on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube. If you enjoy today's episode, please subscribe on iTunes, or your podcast platform of choice, and leave us a review. Thanks very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Robin Tombs.

Today's topic is corporate culture: what works, what doesn't, what needs to change and how. We're joined by three extremely qualified guests to dig into this hairy topic. Duena Blomstrom is the author of Emotional Banking, a book looking at culture in banking specifically. Sharon O'Dea is the former Head of Digital Communications at Standard Chartered and current communications strategy consultant. Alessandro Hatami is the former Group Digital Director at Lloyds Bank and currently advises Tier 1 banks on digital solutions. This conversation was a bit experimental, in terms of both format and subject. Let us know what you think of the group discussion. I'm not sure we reached a conclusion, per se, dealing with a topic as broad as culture, but I think we surfaced some interesting considerations. What did we miss? Let us know on Twitter @rebankpodcast or in the comments section of the episode page at www.bankingthefuture.com/culture. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Duena Blomstrom, Sharon O'Dea and Alessandro Hatami.

Kevin Beardsley is the Managing Director of B2C2, a leading cryptocurrency marketmaker. and one of the 40 coolest people in UK fintech, according to Business Insider. B2C2 provides 24/7/365 liquidity for half a dozen of the leading crytocurrencies in all of the main fiat currencies, plus synthetic exposure to crypto. In his role, Kevin is uniquely positioned to comment on how the institutional investment community interacts with crypto and where the space is going. Prior to joining B2C2, Kevin ran Business Development at Elliptic, a software and investigations company that helps banks and law enforcement agencies monitor Bitcoin transactions and detect suspicious activity. Before that, he was Director of Membership at the Bitcoin Foundation. Today's conversation was a great opportunity to take stock on where the crypto space sits in its development and where it might be going. Connect with us on Twitter @rebankpodcast or on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube. Thanks very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Kevin Beardsley.

Suresh Vaghjiani is the Managing Director of Global Processing Services, a card processor supporting some of the best known fintechs including Monzo, Starling, Revolut, Curve, Osper, Pockit and more. Suresh brings a potentially dry subject to life with some pretty interesting examples of where card technology is going and what new experiences are likely to appear over the next few years. Connect with us on twitter @rebankpodcast or on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Suresh Vaghjiani.

Gregg Schoenberg runs The Financial Revolutionist, a weekly newsletter touching on some of the most interesting developments in financial innovation and linking them in interesting ways to all sorts of social and cultural considerations. Prior to starting the FR, Gregg was a senior executive at Natixis, a French bank, where he ran equities. The FR is published weekly, and you can subscribe at thefinancialrevolutionist.com. Some of the highlights from recent editions include interviews with Max Levchin, Jay Fulcher and others, and some really fascinating thinking about how the world is likely to evolve between now and 2028. In this far reaching conversation, we dig into topics ranging from career reinvention and the future of work to universal basic income, the role of crypto in campaign finance reform and much more.

Today we have the great pleasure of catching up with Cristina Alba Ochoa, CFO, and Valentina Kristensen, Head of Marketing, of OakNorth, one of the UK's leading banks. You thought I was going to say leading challenger banks, which of course they are, but I think it's fair to say they're punching well above their weight. We sat down with OakNorth's co-founder Joel Perlman way back in episode 12, where we got into the founder's story. It's still a highly relevant conversation, and I'd encourage you to check it out. In the year and a half since we connected with Joel, OakNorth has been killing it. They broke even twenty-two months after launch, they've originated close to £1b in loans to UK SMEs, they've raised £250m at a billion dollar plus valuation....oh yeah, and they've built and launched a side hustle called Acorns that could be as big or bigger than OakNorth itself. No big deal. This was such a fun chat with two super smart, high energy women. I don't expect it will be the last time we have them on show. If you enjoy today's episode, share the love on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who signed up for the newsletter in the past week or two. Watch your inbox. Thank you very much for joining us today, please welcome, Cristina Alba Ochoa and Valentina Kristensen.

Anders La Cour is the co-founder and CEO of Saxo Payments Banking Circle, a utility layer providing global transaction processing and payments to the banking industry. Many people talk about banks becoming a backend, payment processing utility layer, and Anders is actively building a business to play that role. Anders is a lawyer by training and worked in M&A advisory and Venture Capital prior to starting Banking Circle. If you enjoy today's episode, check out the entire back catalog at www.bankingthefuture.com. Thank you very much for joining us today, please welcome, Anders La Cour.

Today the focus is on alternative lending, one of the original fintech verticals. Surprisingly, in nearly 80 episodes, we've never gotten deep into alternative lending. After holding off for so long, today we're hitting you with two interviews, one with Jens Woloszczak, the founder and CEO of Spotcap, and the second with Christoph Rieche, founder and CEO of iwoca. As one of the earliest areas of fintech focus, lending has come a long way, and certainly had it's ups and downs - perhaps more to come when we hit a less happy place in the credit cycle. We talk about that with Jens and Christoph, along with what differentiates their models, how balance sheet lending compares to peer to peer lending, where Spotcap and iwoca outperform, and much more. If you haven't signed up for our newsletter yet, head over to bankingthefuture.com and do it now. We're going to be creating a lot of new content across audio, video and written pieces, and the best place to keep up with it all is the mailer. Keep the support coming on social media and through the website. Can't believe we're closing in on 80 episodes. Thanks to all you amazing listeners for seeing us this far.