In this episode we discuss the super-hot and super-important topic of what Risks AI poses to humanity and society. There is perhaps not a hotter and more misunderstood topic than that of AI and the risks it poses. Many indeed fear that “it” will eliminate humans. The influential Geoffrey Hinton, co-creator of the seminal backpropagation algorithm, has been all over the media saying we need to worry and that there is 50% chance that AI outsmarts humanity and poses an existential risk. Other insid...
Jul 04, 2024•1 hr 12 min
LLMs, of which ChatGPT is the most well-known, are perhaps the most awesome tech invention of all time. Even experienced AI folk didn’t see this coming. Most if not all of us will have used ChatGPT. However understanding of how they work is for most people either totally missing or totally misled by anthropomorphic language – thinking, learning, hallucinating, learns like a human, is like your brain and so forth. None of which are actually true in the slightest. In this super-special episode I r...
Jun 20, 2024
The past decade has seen the most extraordinary innovation in any business sector in the UK and thence world since the industrial revolution . An amazing outburst of creativity and independent players emerged on the oldest and stodgiest sector of all – FS. The LFP was the first, and most blue-chip podcast to cover this scene starting in 2014. This episode is like a mini-documentary that takes us one fast-forward through the development and progress of Fintech as it happened and was perceived at ...
Jun 06, 2024•1 hr 4 min
This is a super-short extraordinary LFP outside the usual programming schedule to alert listeners to the crime of mugging folks and then getting them to transfer under duress large sums of money to the thieves bank account. This is apparently on the increase in London and is well-known in countries such as Brazil and South Africa where people may routinely take burner phones with them when going into the City. I initially learned about this risk in this Reddit thread . Many people without reflec...
May 16, 2024•10 min
If you invent the world’s greatest Fintech App in your garden shed that’s impressive – but something only known to you. At which point you need to get the word out to relevant audiences. PR is an essential component in the modern world to help you refine and target that message and to get you and it into the relevant publications/podcasts et al that will reach your target clients and the market in general (think targets for next fund raise perhaps). At a more macro level, the dark side of PR is ...
May 02, 2024•48 min
One major way of innovating is to move into a domain with transferable and out of the box skills/ideas/technology. This presents obvious opportunities for radical change yet naturally produces equally obvious challenges. In this episode we look at how 4 co-founders created a payments infrastructure Fintech that now connects an amazing 7.5 billion bank accounts, 6 billion cards, connect banks in 144 countries and have 620 employees with offices in 35 countries. Ani came from FS and so understood ...
Apr 18, 2024•40 min
The Governance of FS as a whole affects all of our lives as we saw in 2008 let alone in many individual examples of FS/Fintech businesses failing and losing clients money. In our digital age virtually all of our money is digital and next to no-one sees a share certificate any more so all of our investments are digital. Thus what might appear to be a refined topic for a few is at the heart of all of our lives – money being used for roughly everything and savings equating to money saved for tomorr...
Apr 04, 2024•55 min
The tech world focuses heavily on the “succeed fast or fail fast” model of tech growth. In part this is as VC firms generally have limited life funds and hence cannot handle slower models but is also as the tech press loves the hype/condemn cycle implicit in this. However generally most businesses do not follow this model. Whilst rapid success comes to a few, for more it takes rather longer and for many its a slow rocky path. After all hottie OpenAI (ClosedAI?) took quite some years to make a no...
Mar 21, 2024•43 min
The Founder(s) is(are) at the heart of creating something new that literally never existed before. However they very much do not do this in vacuo needing to entice and hire a team below them but also, less well understood, a team around them. The surround will at some point coalesce into a formal Board (as opposed to a pro forma Board for Day0 – and for many days after – NewCos). In this episode experienced NED/Advisor/Mentor/Angel Nic Lenz and I discuss experience in this field with particular ...
Mar 07, 2024•49 min
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 conver...
Feb 22, 2024•47 min
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...
Feb 08, 2024•46 min
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, escap...
Jan 25, 2024•1 hr 24 min
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 ...
Dec 28, 2023•49 min
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 o...
Dec 14, 2023•52 min
Why buy alternative assets? Well in extremis what else would you buy?
Nov 30, 2023•46 min
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 media...
Nov 16, 2023
So rapid is the rate of change in banking and the nature of and control of money right now that today we set a record and have a returning guests a mere 6 months later. Mario ( YouTube Channel ) first joined us in Feb22 for the gargantuan LFP197 “Money in the 21stC: Ballooning Printing of Fiat/QE/”MMT”/Govt Debt, CBDCs, Crypto, Dedollarisation, Hyperinflation, Gold” and more recently in Feb23 for LFP220 “Has A Century Of The Federal Reserve and 50 Years Off The Gold Standard Directly Led To Mone...
Jul 14, 2023•55 min
In this episode we dive not just into the world of Islamic Finance and Fintech but the practical lessons we can learn from the world’s oldest “ethical investment” tradition. In particular in an ever-changing world there is always the need to extend and interpret any given set of “ethical finance” guidelines for new circumstances. The Islamic world has had vastly longer to get to grips with managing this confluence of principle and practice in a Heraclitean world of constant change. In LFP223 we ...
Jun 29, 2023•50 min
The next in our geographic coverage series on global Fintech past present and future with a special bonus of a taste of Fintech in Asia as Michael, a former Fintech founder himself turned VC at Runa Capital had just returned from a three week trip all around the region. Like all regions the US has its peculiarities – not least of which the structure of State and Federal regulation which depending on your vertical can be – as it were – more federal or more confederal in flavour. As in many circs ...
Jun 15, 2023•47 min
Is the structure of regulation in need of refactoring? Do we have a kind of Reg Debt situation – cf Tech Debt – where organic growth has led to complexity, inefficiency and indeed regulations stretched beyond their original purpose? In this episode Alistair and I discuss some specific examples that would indicate that after as much as a decade of evolution it is perhaps time for a rethink or a refactoring of the reg base. Integrated Finance was founded when the co-founders found challenges in sc...
Jun 01, 2023•40 min
The latest in the LFP’s coverage of Fintech in geographical regions and this fascinating balance between the bottom-up and the top-down, between localisation and globalisation of Fintech. As always when covering vast territories containing many nations, “regions” contain widely differing conditions, not least of which background of FS structure and infrastructure in the first place. Said, a partner at Global Ventures , is well-placed to give us a tour d’horizon as not just is his day job being a...
May 18, 2023•42 min
The majority of successful exits for companies are via trade sale (not that given the media hype you’d necessarily imagine it was anything but IPOs). Furthermore the percentage of companies that list on an exchange is falling meaning, that along with the economic circumstances, private companies and remaining in the unlisted space is becoming ever more important. In this episode we dive into the whole soup-to-nuts process of how to trade sell oneself, what the stages are, what the obstacles and ...
May 04, 2023•40 min
It is a well-known trope that although failure is a challenge rapid success, though more desirable lol, can be too. In this episode we dive into the fascinating Case Study of Ecospend who went from startup to trade sale to world open-banking payments leaders Trustly in five years. Along the way they beat off incumbent competition for one of the UK’s largest accounts that of HSBCs self-assessment payments. Which as you might imagine amounts to quite a few transactions. In this show James Hickman,...
Apr 20, 2023•39 min
In this episode we discuss VC early stage investment and whether there is a “VC funding winter” as some have called it or whether just a correction. How should early stage founders who want to raise funds maximise their chances of doing so? Few VCs go down to early stage investing but what factors do they look for? Funding is harder to come by right now but it’s still there. What themes and approaches help? Is it indeed a good rather than a bad time to create a startup? Dr Ric Schaefer is a Part...
Apr 06, 2023•43 min
Fintech is a Big Thing. India is a vast sub-continent. Naveen Bindal, the co–founder of Enkash which is India‘s largest spend management Fintech, joins us to discuss Fintech in India which was one of the first movers in Fintech worldwide and is now by some measures the world’s third largest Fintech marketplace. Naveen started his career some 23 years ago as a developer in a credit card company working on payment processing and with banks. Having been involved in the Indian FinTech space for some...
Mar 23, 2023•41 min
There is a real art to how a founder manages his companies equity. If he gives it, or its derivative, share options, away too fast for too little value – whether funding or staff – he will be giving away his creation on the cheap and losing control fast. Vice versa hoarding it to himself will produce inadequate funding and not top-notch senior staff. If this is the spectrum then there is in addition a whole dimension of the terms and conditions over equity schemes. There are plenty of hidden ele...
Mar 09, 2023•47 min
AI/ML has been around for a long time but recently hit the headlines with ChatGPT which has broken every tech record in the book for a piece of tech that attracts users faster than any other tech ever. If Generative AI is the hot topic of the day though what is happening behind the scenes with more prosaic Fintech use cases. Tristan who is CEO of commodity price predictors and now Insurtech ChAI first joined us in 2016 for an an overview of AI/ML and updated us more recently in 2019 to talk abou...
Feb 23, 2023•46 min
Financial Services is all about Finance which is all about money. However almost all FS employees just accept “money” as a thing in the same way they accept gravity. Which is an odd thing if you think about it. Most of the time this wouldn’t matter but at turning points such as we are at now if can be disastrous, What money is and the regimes around it have varied widely over time and space. However it is true to say that Central Banks are a total exception – indeed the ne plus ultra of Big Stat...
Feb 09, 2023•55 min
Increasing automation is what the tech revolution is about – by definition. In this episode we dive into this topic starting at the highest levels – Government intelligence community quality tech at GCHQ (where Jeremy and his four co-founders had been long-term employees) and the immense value of technology transfer between state and private sectors. We then move through some of the more challenging questions of definition of terms (super-relevant for computers and their usage by business) and t...
Jan 26, 2023•52 min
This 2023 New Year Special forms the fifth is a series of five about how technology is changing us directly and indirectly by empowering tyrants. 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. Sound like a cool topic, a worthy goal to you? It has five chapters: Metapolitical Awakening Psychological Awa...
Jan 12, 2023•1 hr 10 min
