Fintech Insider by 11:FS

Our hosts Simon and Leda are joined by two great guests, Livia Benisty, Head of Financial Crime at ComplyAdvantage and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, MD at Funding Options. First up, Revolut’s brand new banking licence. British fintech unicorn Revolut wins banking licence. Revolut has secured a European banking licence from authorities in Lithuania, allowing them to start offering current accounts and loans across the EU from early next year. Initial focus on Lithuania, where it has about 150,000 customers, before expanding into larger markets including the UK, France and Poland later next year. However, its plans to offer full banking services in its home market could be delayed in the event of a disorderly Brexit if financial firms lose the right to serve retail customers on licences granted in the rest of the EU. Barclays customers to switch off their spending. Barclays has become the first High Street bank to allow its customers to "switch off" certain types of spending on their debit cards. The idea is to help vulnerable customers, particularly problem gamblers, or those in serious debt. They can’t block specific retailers but all account holders can now block their own spending in a number of categories. Fintech is changing how millennials manage debt. Fintech is moving millennials from credit cards to personal loans in the US. Compared to the previous generations, millennials are more likely to take out a personal loan to cover everyday costs, relying less heavily on credit cards as their predecessors. Fintech firms originated 36% of all personal loans last year, compared to less than 1 percent in 2010. Metro payments go international. Metro Bank is adding international payments through personal and business accounts via its mobile app. The new service enables customers to make same day Swift and next day SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) payments in Euros, US dollars and Sterling. International payments are integrated alongside the app’s domestic payments functionality, and allows customers to choose whether they or the payee cover the charges. We spoke to Alex Park, Metro Bank’s Director of Digital to tell us more about this, how it was a customer-led initiative, and what’s coming next. HSBC Launches robo advisors. My Investment, an online platform designed to make wealth advice accessible to investors, will be available from as little as £1,000 to invest at an initial charge of 0.5% followed by fees of up to 0.46%. HSBC estimates My Investment could be used by 2.87 million of its existing retail customers, including many who may not have considered wealth management an option in the past. Advice will be given based on investor's answers to questions about their finances, investment experience and appetite to risk. Funding Options bags CMA prize. Business finance marketplace, Funding Options, has been announced as one of the winners of the second phase of Nesta’s ‘Open Up Challenge’ - one of only three companies to have won both stages of this challenge. The Open Up Challenge prize is part of a package of reforms from the Competition and Markets Authority designed to shake up retail banking. Plaid to hit $2.65B valuation. $250M series C fundraising round led by Mary Meeker who will join the board. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital and others. The platform allows companies to create financial services applications without having to hire their own team of engineers to build out a tool that connects apps to its users’ bank accounts. Plaid builds infrastructure that allows a consumer to interact with their bank account on the web through a number of third-party applications, like Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub. SoftBank’s record breaking IPO. SoftBank Group Corp is set to raise 2.65 TRILLION yen ($23.5 billion) in Japan’s biggest-ever IPO. The share sale widely regarded as finalizing the group’s transition from domestic telco to a monolithic global tech investor. It also said it will sell all extra shares set aside for excess demand, taking the total just shy of the record $25 billion raised in 2014 by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group - of which it also owns a 30% share. SoftBank offered nearly 2 billion shares for sale and allocated over 80% of the sale for domestic retail investors. Barclaycard joins up with Evernym. Barclaycard wants to make passwords a thing of the past and as such they have joined an accelerator programme run by self-sovereign identity (SSI) specialist Evernym. SSI is the concept of enabling people to securely store information about their digital identity, totally under their control, so that they can share verifiable proof of who they are, for life. We spoke to Evernym MD Andy Tobin to find our more about this partnership and the Evernym accelerator. And Finally... Finger payments to go campus-wide at Copenhagen Business School. Finger vein payments technology is to be introduced campus-wide at Copenhagen Business School. The technology, named FingoPay, works via an electronic reader which builds a 3D map of the customer’s finger veins, generating a 'natural personal key' - thus removing the need for the individual to enter any personal details upon registration to make a payment. FingoPay successfully processed more than 12,000 transactions in the restaurant and coffee shop of the business school. All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider! ​ Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast. ​ Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com ​ This week's episode was produced by Laura Watkins, written by Dhanum Nursigadoo and edited by Alex Woodhouse. Special Guests: Leda Glyptis, Livia Benisty, and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard.

In this week's insights show we're bringing you reindeer burgers, christmas trees and death metal. We've also got some great insight into the payments innovation taking place in Scandinavia, what the future of payments will look like and whether or not cash will be removed from society entirely. We've got Finland, Iceland and Sweden represented this evening so there's a ton of local insight for you to enjoy. Our amazing guests include: Kristian Luoma, Head of OP Labs at OP Aoife Houlihan, VP of Communications at Klarna Ásgeir Örn Ásgeirsson, CTO & co-founder, Meniga Anthony Craufurd, Director, Venture and Startup Engagement at Visa Europe Sami Honkonen, CEO and Founder of Tomorrow Tech We also test your payments knowledge with some truly bizarre and interesting payment methods throughout history. A big thank you to all our guests and an even bigger thank you to Kristian, Marjaana and the team at OP for bringing us back to Helsinki for a second year in a row! Slush After Parties are always amazing and we had a fantastic time. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow Fintech Insider on Twitter or Facebook. If you really loved it, please leave us a review, we love reading them! This episode was produced by Laura Watkins. Recorded and edited by Michael Bailey and Alex Woodhouse. Special Guests: Anthony Craufurd, Aoife Houlihan, Ásgeir Örn Ásgeirsson, Kristian Luoma, and Sami Honkonen.

Simon's with the founder and creator of Ethereum, one of the largest cryptocurrencies, Vitalik Buterin to talk about the future and enterprise capabilities of DLT, blockchain and Ethereum. And just what are zero-knowledge proofs? Here's a little sneak preview on what happened. Listen to the full interview on Thursday 13th December over on Blockchain Insider - bi.11fs.com Special Guest: Vitalik Buterin.

Our hosts Simon and Ryan are joined by Menno van Leeuwen, Head of Business & Customer Development at Moneyou, Guy Stiebel, VP Products at SCANOVATE and Paul Stamper, Head of Financial Services, Ipsos MORI. First up, all the misinformation in the world. Monzo attacked for lending customers money to buy its shares. Monzo, has been accused of “going beyond the pale” by allowing its customers to get into debt to buy its shares. As discussed on last week’s show, Monzo is aiming to raise £20 million through crowdfunding. The prospectus shows that it will allow eligible customers to go overdrawn by up to £1,000 to buy shares. Brexcellent preparations. As things stand regarding Brexit, banks and others will need bases in the EU27. Danièle Nouy, the head of the supervisory arm of the European Central Bank (ECB), said recently that 37 firms, including 25 banks, had secured new or improved licences or were close to doing so. ECB is insisting that banks set up more than mere “empty shells” and wants banks to avoid being “overly reliant” on “back-to-back” hedging strategies. Scoring, for generation rent. Rental payments now show on your Experian Credit Report. Experian Credit Reports now include the rental payment information of more than 1.2 million tenants from across the UK. Adding rental data to credit reports means 45% more tenants will be able prove their identity online and are more likely to have increased access to financial products. Licence to bank. P2P lender Zopa granted full UK banking licence. Zopa, the 13-year-old peer-to-peer lender, has become the first of its kind to be awarded a full UK banking licence. The new bank will allow Zopa to increase its offerings with a new fixed-term savings account and credit card. Also expected to roll out a new money management app. We spoke to Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana to get a closer look at what their plans are now they have a full UK banking licence. Line into banking. Line crosses into banking with Mizuho tie-up. Line will launch digital banking services by 2020 in collaboration with Mizuho Financial Group, aiming to break into the sector using its domestic user base of 78 million. Initially, the venture with Mizuho will let users remit small sums by smartphone and offer small loans for that purpose. We spoke to our very own APAC insider, Brandon Chung to get more of an insight into what this means. Not quite 5 star service. Card details at risk in massive Marriott data breach. The details of millions of payment cards may have been exposed in a hack on hotel giant Marriott affecting 500 million guests. Guest reservations database of its Starwood unit has been compromised since 2014. For 327 million, the compromised information includes some combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. Contactless charity. London installs network of contactless donation points to help the homeless. Londoners can now make contactless donations to homelessness charities through a network of terminals across the city. The TAP donation points have so far been installed in 35 locations across London, with more than 90 to appear across the capital this winter. Each tap of the card on the terminal deducts a £3 donation, which will be split between the 22 charities comprising the London Homeless Charities Group. And Finally… A rat’s gotta eat. A rat broke into an ATM, ate nearly $20,000 worth of cash, died. A rat in Assam state, India, squeezed its way inside an ATM machine, consumed and destroyed $17,662 worth of Rupees, and promptly died. When technicians attended the ATM they found looked like the contents of a paper shredder, with the rat already dead and buried within the mountain of minced up money. No foul play is suspected. All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider! ​ Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast. ​ Let us know your thoughts @FintechInsiders and join the discussion by signing up at www.fintechinsidernews.com ​ This week's episode was produced by Laura Watkins, written by Dhanum Nursigadoo and edited by Alex Woodhouse. Special Guests: Brandon Chung, Guy Stiebel, Jaidev Janardana, Menno van Leeuwen, Paul Stamper, and Ryan Garner.

In this week's insights show we're bringing you a deep discussion on what's happening in the regtech space. We have some brilliant experts to take on these issues including: Jason Boud, CEO of Regtech associates Diana Paredes, CEO + Co-founder Suade Labs Nick Cook, Head of Regtech & Advanced Analytics FCA Nas Ahmed, General Counsel, 11:FS Our roundtable talks about what regtech is solving for, the costs of compliance and risk, what hurdles exist to the adoption of regtech by big financial institutions, technological problems that the big institutions face, how to overcome them and how involved regulators should be in setting the agenda. All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider! ​ Subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a review on iTunes and every other podcast app. Spread the fintech love by sharing or tweeting this podcast. ​ Let us know your thoughts on Twitter @FintechInsiders ​ This week's episode was produced by Petrit Berisha. Edited by Alex Woodhouse. Special Guests: Diana Paredes, Jason Boud, Nas Ahmed, and Nick Cook.