Usama Fayyad is the CEO of Open Insights, a US-based data strategy and technology company. Usama also serves as CTO of Stella.AI a Mountain View, CA based, VC-Funded startup, and as Interim Chief Operations & Technology Officer for new, innovation-focused division of MTN, Africa's largest telecommunications provider. From 2013-2016, Usama was Chief Data Officer at Barclays. He remains active in UK banking as a special advisor to the Board of Nationwide, the world's largest building society. From...
Mar 28, 2017•43 min
David Brear is one of the most prominent thinkers and doers in our industry. David is focused on addressing one of the biggest challenges in banking: driving technological innovation at large, incumbent organizations. David is CEO and co-founder of 11:FS, a FinTech consultancy that helps banks become truly digital. He's also cohost of FinTech Insider, a blockbuster podcast about FinTech and financial services. Named among the Top 100 Most Influential FinTech Leaders of 2016, David is one of the ...
Mar 21, 2017•41 min
Two Queens of Fintech, Duena Blomstrom and Liz Lumley, join us today for an insightful conversation about bank-fintech collaboration, plus an exclusive announcement from Duena. Duena headed sales for Meniga, a successful Icelandic fintech startup, from 2010-2015. Duena has been investing in and advising fintech startups since then, especially on commercial and go-to-market strategies. Liz ran StartupBootcamp Fintech's 2015 London program and then led ecosystem development for the accelerator. Sh...
Mar 14, 2017•35 min
Eugene Danilkis is co-founder and CEO of Mambu , a banking technology provider based in Berlin. Eugene is literally a rocket scientist: He led a software engineering team developing NASA-certified software for the International Space Station prior to founding Mambu. Mambu is a cloud-based technology platform that enables banks and fintechs to rapidly address new market opportunities and reduce the high costs previously associated with software licenses, maintenance and in-house infrastructure. M...
Mar 07, 2017•39 min
Simon Cant and Danny Gilligan, founding partners of Reinventure, an Australia-based, fintech venture capital fund, join us today for a discussion on fintech investing. Simon and Danny are entrepreneurs, and they bring that experience and mindset to venture investing. We cover a number of interesting topics today, including how Reinventure thinks about fintech investing, how best to engage and support startups, where fintech is going in the next decade, the untapped opportunity in data and more. ...
Feb 28, 2017•45 min
Nektarios Liolios is CEO & Co-founder of Startupbootcamp FinTech and Startupbootcamp InsurTech, the leading innovation programs in the financial and insurance industries. The programs provide funding, mentorship and office space in the heart of London, Singapore & New York, along with access to a global network of investors and VCs, for up to 10 selected FinTech startups per class. Nektarios has spent nearly 20 years in fintech, previously with Clearstream and SWIFT, where he ran the Innotribe S...
Feb 21, 2017•46 min
Shazam founder Dhiraj Mukherjee joins the show today. Dhiraj is currently Head of Innovation at Virgin Money, a prominent UK bank and part of Richard Branson's Virgin Group. After graduating from Dartmouth College and then Stanford GSB, Dhiraj co-founded Shazam, one of the best known apps of all time. Launched in 2002, the platform is alive and well today. Dhiraj is a seasoned digital innovation and experience design professional, launching digital platforms around music, movies, advertising and...
Feb 14, 2017•35 min
Sophie Guibaud is Head of European Expansion for Fidor Bank, one of Europe's original and best known digital-only banks. Originally launched in Germany in 2009, Fidor expanded into the UK in 2015. Prior to joining Fidor, Sophie led product strategy and commercialization at Bankable, a white-label banking platform provider. Before that, she was the Chief Marketing Officer at HelloFresh, a Rocket Internet-backed ready-to-cook meal delivery startup. Sophie is regularly mentioned among top fintech i...
Feb 07, 2017•34 min
Dave Birch (@dgwbirch) is Director of Innovation at Consult Hyperion, a secure electronic transactions consultancy. Dave is an internationally-recognized thought leader in digital identity and digital money. He has been named one of the global top 15 best sources of business information by Wired Magazine, one of the top ten most influential voices in banking by the Financial Brand, one of the top three most influential people in London’s FinTech community by City A.M, and more. Dave is perhaps E...
Jan 31, 2017•45 min
Syrian refugees are facing one of the most difficult challenges humans can experience. Balazs Nemethi, founder of Taqanu, wants to support them in their plight. Taqanu seeks to provide banking to anyone, regardless of background and available documents. One of their first target user groups is refugees displaced by unrest in Syria, but the potential for a solution like Taqanu extends across refugees, migrants, the financially excluded and beyond - to any user group seeking a digital solution to ...
Jan 24, 2017•34 min
Pascal Bouvier (@pascalbouvier) is a full-time venture capital investor, fintech practitioner and prolific blogger. Before becoming a full-time venture capitalist, Pascal founded and ran startups, worked for commercial and investment banks, and has been at one time or another a CFO, COO, CIO… the list goes on. Pascal is currently Venture Partner with Santander InnoVentures. Prior to joining InnoVentures, he built the fintech venture arm of Route 66 Ventures into a top global fintech investor. To...
Jan 17, 2017•51 min
Financial inclusion is a global issue. In fact, it's probably more global than most of us think. Even in developed markets like the UK, US and Western Europe, there are huge numbers of unbanked people. Pockit, a UK-based neobank, is addressing that problem in the UK. Launched in 2014 and currently serving 123,000 customers, Pockit is making a profound impact on the lives of a huge number of financially underserved individuals. Virraj Jatania, Founder and CEO of Pockit, joins us in Episode 21 to ...
Jan 10, 2017•48 min
This is Part 2 of a two-part review of our first 18 episodes. Before you rip out your headphones in disgust, let me explain. I'm not a fan of the classic "year in review", I mean, we were all there, right? If we were paying attention the first time around, why do we need to get sentimental? Similarly, previews of the year to come, while sometimes fun, are often pure speculation and rarely add value. In this two-part episode, we've attempted to do something we'd been planning for a while: analysi...
Jan 03, 2017•46 min
Episode 19 is a special one. We're celebrating the year-end with a long-overdue dive into some of the key concepts that have found their way across multiple episodes to date. We've interviewed some of the most noteworthy founders, investors, thinkers and doers in fintech & banking innovation over the past few months. Their insight and analysis will see us well into 2017 and beyond, so we're hunkering down over the holiday break to dig into it in detail. In Part 1 of our exploration, we break dow...
Dec 21, 2016•1 hr 11 min
Andra Sonea is a banking systems specialist. Until recently Lead Solutions Architect within the Innovation & Digital Development Directorate at Lloyds Banking Group in London, Andra is currently pursuing a prestigious Anthemis Fellowship to build on her work in banking systems architecture. Andra has been involved in fintech for many years and is a keen supporter of collaboration between financial services institutions and start-ups. Prior to joining Lloyds in 2014, Andra worked for over fifteen...
Dec 13, 2016•31 min
We've got a great episode today with Tom Blomfield (@t_blom), co-founder and CEO of Monzo (@monzo), a new, digital-only challenger bank in the UK. Monzo is seeking to fundamentally change the way banking is done and challenge a lot of assumptions about the way people want to interact with their money. Tom is a serial entrepreneur, he founded an e-commerce platform for students called boso.com while he was in college and later launched GoCardless, a B2B payments company that raised funding from t...
Dec 06, 2016•46 min
Brett King (@brettking) is a bestselling author and was voted Innovator of the Year for 2012 by American Banker. Since 2010 Brett has released 5 Global Bestselling books, including Bank 2.0, Branch Today – Gone Tomorrow, Bank 3.0, Breaking Banks and his latest Augmented. His books have topped bestseller charts for banking in 18 countries and have been translated into 9 languages. A global thought leader in financial services and customer experience, Brett publishes regularly in his role as indus...
Nov 29, 2016•49 min
David Robson leads IBM's Watson business in the European financial services sector. Perhaps the world's most recognizable AI system (after HAL 9000), IBM's Watson is live across multiple industries and is using artificial intelligence to solve hard, real world problems. For the uninitiated: Watson is a cognitive computer that can read, understand, reason and engage with humans in support of a broad range of knowledge workers including medicine, banking and insurance. David has been working with ...
Nov 22, 2016•28 min
Brian Roemmele is the consummate Renaissance man. He is a scientist, researcher, analyst, connector, thinker and doer. More than anything, I've found Brian to be an observer of the world, asking questions and following his seemingly infinite curiosity to the root of an astounding variety of issues. Over the long, winding arc of his career, Brian has built and run payments and tech businesses, worked in media, including the promotion of top musicians, and explored a variety of other subjects alon...
Nov 15, 2016•58 min
Devie Mohan is a prominent fintech writer, speaker and commentator. Devie is the co-founder and CEO of Burnmark, a fintech research company established in partnership with Berlin-based FinLeap. She is also a market strategist and UK coordinator with FinLeap. Throughout the course of her career, Devie has helped numerous banks, startups, innovation groups and investors understand the trends in fintech, helping them set their corporate, marketing and investment strategies. She is an adamant propon...
Nov 08, 2016•30 min
Oaknorth is a startup bank in the UK. Joel Perlman, Oaknorth's co-founder, is a UK-based serial entrepreneur. After starting his career at McKinsey, Joel eventually left to co-found Copal Partners, a financial research outsourcing company with his business partner, Rishi Khosla. Over a period of 12 years, they grew the business to almost 3,000 people before selling it to Moody's in 2014. Subsequently, Joel and Rishi founded OakNorth, a new UK bank focused on lending to entrepreneurs and mid-size...
Nov 01, 2016•27 min
Chris Gledhill is the #1 fintech influencer globally and regularly speaks and writes about fintech, banking and the future of financial services. Chris was lead mobile architect and led the disruptive innovation labs at Lloyds Banking Group before founding Secco (@seccoaura), a next generation "bank." Chris has expertise spanning a wide range of disruptive technologies including Blockchain, AI, APIs, Big Data, Deep Learning, Virtual Reality, Crypto Currencies, Biometrics, Mobile & Wearables. Chr...
Oct 25, 2016•41 min
APIs and banking as a platform will revolutionize banking. This week we’ve got a special two part edition, with two guests who represent arguably the future of banking and financial services technology. Martin Häring is the Chief Marketing Officer of Misys (www.misys.com), a global core banking provider that recently opened its systems to third party development, in yet another sign that the industry is moving toward an API-connected, platform model. I think Misys is doing revolutionary work, an...
Oct 20, 2016•46 min
Duena Blomstrom is an independent digital banking consultant, entrepreneur, VC, speaker and, in her words, "uncomfortably opinionated blogger." For the past 18 years, Duena has worked across Telco and Finance on strategy and consulting for sales and marketing, including a 5-year stint as Head of Sales and Marketing for Meniga. During her time at Meniga, the company went from being a tiny Icelandic start-up to a market leader in customer engagement. Duena works at the intersection of technology a...
Oct 12, 2016•35 min
Michael O’Connor is a fintech & banking advisor and investor with extensive experience analyzing, structuring and investing in banking and financial services deals. Before going independent earlier this year, Michael was a portfolio manager looking at credit and banking transactions for Arrowgrass Capital Partners, a prominent, London-based, financial services-focused alternative investment fund. Prior to Arrowgrass, Michael was a founding partner at Portman Capital Partners, where he advised UK...
Oct 04, 2016•43 min
Slava Solodkiy founded Life.SREDA, a fintech-focused VC fund, in 2012 and has been running it ever since. Life.SREDA 1, which was focused on A-rounds in the US and Europe, invested $40m in 13 companies including Fidor, Moven, Simple, Anthemis, SumUp and Rocketbank. In November 2014, Life.SREDA launched its second fund, a $100m fund focused on B-rounds in Asia. So far, fund 2 has invested in companies including Fastacash, Mobikon, Lenddo, Ayannah and SoftPay. Life.SREDA also runs a $100m global b...
Sep 27, 2016•42 min
Alex Tapscott is a globally recognized thought-leader, advocate, speaker and writer focused on the impact of emerging technologies on business, society and government. Alex is the co-author of the critically acclaimed best-seller, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World. He is the author of dozens of articles featured in publications such as TIME, Harvard Business Review, The McKinsey Quarterly, Forbes, Fortune, Quartz, The Globe and Ma...
Sep 20, 2016•35 min
Faisal Khan, a veritable payments & remittances guru, joins us for the show today. Faisal is a banking and payments consultant providing advisory services to banks, financial services companies and startups. He specializes is cross-border money transfer and all aspects of the value-chain associated with it, across B2B, B2C and C2C. Faisal has extensive knowledge in the design, integration & operation of payment networks and systems for international money transmission. Two things set Faisal apar...
Sep 05, 2016•47 min
Chris Skinner is one of the world's most authoritative voices on the future of banking. Chris is a writer, speaker, analyst and commentator covering all things digital banking. Chris has published multiple books on the future of banking and fintech, including most recently ValueWeb, which in Chris's own words explores "the open-sourcing of financial services using apps, analytics, APIs...and blockchain." Chris is on the Advisory Boards of a number of companies including Innovate Finance, Moven a...
Sep 05, 2016•49 min
This week, we're joined by Jason Bates, co-founder of 11:FS and the bank formerly known as Mondo. Banking is becoming digital. In the UK, four digital-only retail banks are poised for roll-out, and the trend extends to Europe, the US, Canada, and much of the rest of the world. Jason has extensive experience in digital transformation in banking, including co-founding not one but two digital challenger banks, Mondo and Starling. Join us for a deep dive into the problems digital banks are trying to...
Aug 27, 2016•51 min
