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So far Fintech has lionised technologies – APIs, Open Banking, AI/ML and so forth. But from a different perspective these are just glues to connect things that haven’t been connected before to make new propositions not previously possible. Although this has been touched on so far – marketplaces aren’t the best example – after all marketplaces are tens of thousands of years old.

OConnor.jpg">OConnor-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150"> In this episode we are joined by serial entrepreneur Sam O’Connor, CEO of Coconut to discuss convergence – the gluing together of components which were previously seen as different things.

Our smartphones glue together things we would have historically done in different places using different devices – camera, mp3 player, and emails for example, In the same way Coconut are focusing on micro-businesses into which all of us indies seem to need to fold ourselves these days and combining banking, accounting and tax in one place – items which historically would have been seen as different propositions.

Topics discussed include:

• the morning after the night before – how the election looks the morning of the results
• a shoutout for Tea2You Borough Market
• Brexit certainty and uncertainty in the new world of Boris I
• positive visions for the future as opposed to managing the present
• in or out the EU regulations are like a black hole distorting space around them
• open banking as an example of UK pioneering ahead of the game
• in 3-5yrs time we could be a lot better or a lot worse – we shall see…
• British long-term strengths at muddling-through
• comparison of the British East India Company and the French East India Company formation as archetypal history
• state-centrism, technocracy and top-down approaches to governance on the Continent as opposed to British bottom-up, decentralised
• Sam’s career journey as an entrepreneur
• the rationale behind the formation of Coconut
• the challenges of being an indie – how there is a genuine problem to be solved
• accountancy software MegaCos market caps around $100bn
• “90% of new SME’s since 2000 are non-employing businesses”
• 5.7m SMEs in UK of which 5m are owner-managed businesses
• gluing together different silos – example of Coconut
• accounting historic changes to cloud
• importance of platforms like Amazon or Uber opening up their platforms data
• unexpected benefits that came from combining functionality in the smartphone
• example of payments and invoicing and additional functionality
• have App Banks been doing this well – product-push versus demand-pull
• customer acquisition
• reconceptualisations of eg banking data as amounting to real-time accounting information
• Coconuts running assessment of P&L as an example of “real-time accounting” as opposed to collecting cashflow data and then finding out what the accounts say at the end of the year
• how technology and market shift to more portfolio careers are overlapping
• the highest earner on Substack earns over $0.5m p.a
• shoutout for Smart Pension’s tie-up with Revolut
• Coconut are customers of Smart Pension
• why Coconut is called Coconut…
• Coconuts planned fund-raising in 2020 Q1

And much more more

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