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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.

Hickman.jpg">Hickman-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">In this show James Hickman, CCO, discusses the journey and the experience thereof along with lessons relevant to all tech firms well outside of Fintech.

The journey starts with the build, then the marketing, then astronomical success, then the operational concerns attendant on having your volumes increase astronomically up all the way to the strategic implications for a business with such sudden success – various possibilities for raises to enable continued scaling or a trade sale and Ecospend checked-out both eventually preferring one route over t’other and explain their thinking in their situation, your firms might of course be different. At the end of the day it comes down both to rational business calculation but also to the preferences and long term aims of the founding team.

Overall quite some story and a tale that the cliche that massive success can be a right challenge/pain isn’t always correct.

Topics discussed include:

• James career in the media including as a media VC
• experiencing the massive tech disruption in the media world
• interest in open banking and pivoting from a long media career into Fintech
• processing £13bn within a few years of founding a firm
• is it risky having no “physical bank” bank accounts
• the pivotal role of getting the tech right right from the start in terms of the whole rest of the business chain that flows therefrom
• “anti-MVP”
• scaling tech volumes
• scalability of systems
• “if you are a small business you should start by servicing a small customer and build from there. We actually did the reverse – we started with possibly the biggest customer we could imagine”
• one million transactions in January
• the super-importance of easy scalability in tech success in general for all tech sectors
• scalability pre the ubiquitous tech infrastructure we have around us today
• people challenges in a tech business
• “business is all about the people”
• operational challenges – making them smoother
• fears of being over-run by customer service requests
• need to genuinely deliver value to buyer/seller and leverage existing societal trends
• “our volumes are growing by 500-1000% per annum and employee base by less than 10% per annum” – an amazing metric for the power of digital if one gets it right
• key success factors
• mindset as importance – “walking the walk” is a rapid transition when competing against the big players
• how easy is it to connect to UK banks in the current schema for open-banking
• strategic implications of massive increases in volumes
• management challenge of operational and strategic challenges at the same time
• central role of the founders vision
• checking out the VC route and lessons learned/advice
• no cannibalisation of product with Trustly who are PE backed and in the same space
• “in these emerging technologies you always see consolidation and smaller players merging with larger ones” – a useful point for many Fintechs (and others) to bear in mind in the current phase of growth/economic climate
• the media focus on “unicorning” as very misleading re the general path of successful startups/businesses
• looking for synergies in trade selling
• cultural aspects of exponential rise in volumes and trade selling – how does one approach these?
• alignment of objectives and cultural alignment as super-important
• shared vision and personal relationships
• Ecospend’s products and services
• “a replacement to cards” – multiple benefits
• the next generation of payments
• going live with Hargreaves Landsdown
• the road goes on forever…

And much much more

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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?

Schaefer.jpg">Schaefer-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150"> Dr Ric Schaefer is a Partner at Target Global which is a pan-European technology investment firm with more than €3 billion in assets under management. Whilst investing across all stages of the startup to realisation  lifecycle they are relatively unique in investing from pre-seed to A rounds.

To date via six global offices they have backed 15 unicorns and also have an investment in Revolut who you may have heard of.

Topics discussed include:

• training for a triathlon starting from a standard level of fitness
• Ric’s career journey from tech through the banking crisis to VC-dom
• ten years of VC and Angel investing
• the experiential difference between BigCo and SmallCo life
• what a VC looks for in early stage investment include:
  • people who bring an unfair advantage
  • those who have had a successful venture before
  • the right vision and clear plan
  • those who have the “founder gene” and the drive to solve a problem
  • also like to back operators who have been number two or three in a business that has already scaled
• success isn‘t just about money but about winning and building a sustainable business
• examples form people who retire but just wither in absentia a daily challenge
• the focus of early stage VCs need to be on building a big company, not just optimizing finances
• different types of founders who can do the ‘zero to one‘ or the scale up from 1 to 10 or growth from 10 to 100
• preference for founders who can “go the whole way”
• VC funds still have a lot of capital available, but it is more competitive for newcomers
• Non–institutional capital such as crowdfunding and angel investors have pulled back due to more competitive dynamics.
• It is a good time to start a business – there is a wider pool of talent available and infrastructure has been built to enable businesses to be built far faster
• Valuations are more reasonable than the last two years and people are looking more at multiples and the fundamentals of the business
• Ric’s expectation of the best sectors for fund-raising and progress
• Target Global is an early–stage venture capital firm that invests across the lifecycle of businesses, from inception to growth
• invests in consumer, software, fintech, marketplace, and digital health sectors
• has offices in Berlin, Tel Aviv, London, and Spain, and has backed over 100 companies
• VCs invest in relationships and a series of rejections does not mean a no forever
•  Target Global is looking to invest in founders with a unique advantage.

And much much more

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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.

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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 10 years along with his co-founders who each also have two decades in FS and tech under their belts he is well-placed to guide us through its evolution past, present and future.

Topics discussed include:

• why India‘s timezone is 30 minutes out of phase with almost all other countries
• Naveen’s career journey
• the move from being a dev to being a CEO
• Naveen learnt how to be an entrepreneur by working with a startup within an existing organisation
• the principal FinTech hubs in India are Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore
• Mumbai is the banking hub of India due to the presence of the Reserve Bank of India,  Bangalore is renowned for its tech talent and New Delhi is an extension of the other two hubs due to its status as the capital
• Fintechs may start in other cities but almost invariably end up gravitating to one of the big three cities
•  The Indian fintech industry started to grow following the financial crisis of 2008 and the emergence of e–commerce
• Payment aggregators, P2P lending, payment gateways, digital marketplaces, prepaid cards, and UPI all emerged between 2010 and 2016
• IndiaStack has been hugely influential in Indian Fintech’s rapid development
• it was introduced in 2017-18 to facilitate digitisation and verify the identity of those making transactions
• Aadhaar was introduced, which provided a unique identifier for every individual, and biometric scans for fingerprint and retina scans were captured
• the pertinent/ironic etymology of chosing Aadhaar for the state’s identification system
• are privacy concerns an issue in India over a national identification scheme?
• in 2012, we saw the real growth actually happening where multiple payment instruments, quick checkout experiences sort of emerged, including but not limited to wallets, one-click checkouts, tokenization, and various other faster checkout mechanisms
• demographically about one billion people in India have access to smartphones with half a billion people living in rural areas
• around 70 million SMEs exist in India, and between 70–80 billion dollars of volume is processed on UPI each year
• given the size of the marketplace Indian Fintechs have little reason to expand internationally although different dynamics occur in the pure tech space
• Consumer payments have been the dominant sector of fintech in India, but insure tech and reg tech are also becoming increasingly prominent
• reg tech allows fintechs to access the data needed to verify businesses and individuals
• The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) provides the regulatory framework for fintechs to operate in conjunction with regulated entities
• embedded finance and open banking will be key areas of disruption in the future in India
• Enkassh provides a platform for CFOs to automate mundane tasks
• it has 150 employees and processes between $3.5–4 billion annually for 9000 businesses
• Enkash is looking for partnerships in other geographies to distribute some of their products

And much more

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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 elephant traps for the unwary even for “Day1 co-founders” (eg a simple 50:50 split yet one co-founder puts most of the work in…). Furthermore we have what was “pre-tech” an administrative nightmare of managing hordes of shareholders and regulations/laws thereto. Vestd who formed in 2014 and have thousands of companies on their platform offer a “guided SAAS” product where the platform is closely allied to tons of experience in re.

Ifty-03.jpg">Ifty-03-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Founder and CEO Ifty Nasir formed the company in 2014 after a lifetime’s international career with BP and considerable experience on the internal corporate finance side of deals and equity including at one point hiring Lord Sumption on a challenging deal. He joins us today to discuss the whole “how hard can it be” (as always “harder” and in this case “quite nuanced”).

Topics discussed include:

• the first Yorkshireman on the show?
• Lord Sumption’s office
• Ifty’s worldwide career in BP
• founding Vestd
• experiences with estimating funding costs and how much equity it takes to Angel and to get a business off the ground
• seeing how many times sweat equity went wrong… 
• “so many errors are people don’t think about it”
• problems even on day1 of NewCo – case study of a new business and some basic pitfalls
• “Putting together shareholder agreements is the difficult thing”
• agile partnerships as a template
• conditionality as key
• Case Study of the first company I worked for
• the fluidity of equity, salary and time in contributing to the growth of the NewCo
• “there are a lot of really great tools around this – eg Mike Moore’s ‘Slicing Pie’ “
• challenges eve with equity-low,
• cash-rich NewCos in the consultancy space
• the experience of many founders in managing the Cap Table that its no big deal, a spreadsheet for a few years and then suddenly a great panic/problem – dynamics that come from not fully understanding a topic and the risks being run and then those risks crystallising
• the different standards of retaining or not retaining equity when one leaves a company
• definition of Cap Table
• does it include Share Options as well as issued capital?
• fully-diluted Cap Tables
• clearing up the cap tables and how the importance of this has changed the raise dynamics with the advent of firms like Vestd
• the role of technology in changing these whole dynamics
• share option schemes and when one joins the company leading to very variable rewards and management challenges – my experience
• tiers of management sitting around not trying hard any longer as an outcome of a poorly designed lock-in/vesting scheme
• good leaver/bad leaver terms
• the UK’s EMI incentives scheme and the tax incentives/benefits thereof
• 70% of such schemes are “exit only”
• discussion of the challenges of overly-locking in staff and waiting for exits which in difficult markets may be far far away
• tailoring schemes per employee and how much easier that is with platforms
• “guided SAAS” product/service and the regulatory restrictions thereon
• where and when to use accountants, lawyers and Vestd
• Vestd’s plans for the future

And much much more

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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 about then hot-topics. What has changed – what is with Generative AI, what are the behind the scenes factors driving change, how are fintechs being invested and indeed how is investment in Fintech being affected by AI?

We first heard from Tristan a long-term academic and Fintech-er in the whole AIML realm in 2016 for an overview of the topic which has remained in the top 5 most downloaded episodes of all time. In 2019 re joined us to discuss hot topics in AIML in particular prediction, explicability, alt. Data sources and self learning.

Fletcher.jpg">Fletcher-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Three factors have been driving an astonishing rate of change – computing power (NVIDIA been increasing by a factor of 10 every year in recent years), an abundance of data sources beyond all recognition even a few years ago and advances in computer science – not least of which Transformers (the T in GPT and a leap forward from RNNs), so-called self-attention and RLHF – reinforcement learning from human feedback. In the image space the likes of, GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), Latent Diffusion Models and the clever use of efficiency gains.

Taking the current eye-catcher as a metric GPT1 was released in 2018, GPT2 in 2019 and GPT3 in 2020 with its offshoot ChatGPT in 2022. GPT3 has 176bn parameters compared to GPT2’s 1.5bn and was trained on 570GB of data compared to 40GB. Huuuge changes.

But this is just the sexiest, most public face of AIML which as a whole has been finally one might say getting somewhere are computing power continues to increase. As we heard in LFP219 the ex-GCHQ-ers at Ripjar have a database of 18bn news articles which they can process. Once one gets to this kind of scale of computing then – even avoiding the unfortunate anthropomorphism implicit in terms like intelligence or learning – if we simply revert to the oldskool term data processing then we are getting to a stage where the results from data processing are truly phenomenal. Even I have shifted to keeping track of the latest developments having been pretty sniffy about the uber-hype of a field that generally failed in most of its initial objectives set out by pioneers in the 60s.

Topics discussed include:

• experiences using ChatGPT – Case Study with monetary policy in economics
• the need to “learn to dance” with Generative AI systems
• comparison with the early search engines – cf now there is a verb “to Google”
• the challenge of tying up Generative AI systems to the real world and hence late to the party and suitable for a subcategory of use cases
• media hysteria in re as a phenomenon
• machines making us machines
• one of the unmentioned reasons behind its success is that much of human thinking/discourse right now is bland and predictable
• Barnum statements
• Tristan’s overview of AI changes over the past four years
  • way more pervasive
  • field now so broad it’s hard to be an expert in all subsilos
  • people no longer afraid of it nor hypnotised by it
  • people less sceptical re fund-raising an rather view it as something that should be using it by default
  • cloud means that everyone can become a data scientist at much lower entry costs
• Tristan has changed his mind over concern about not sufficiently sophisticated users of cloud AI tools – in particular the leap forwards in user interfaces
• encapsulation
• so many people have used them the interface has been perfected
• the importance however of domain understanding if less so AI understanding
• explicability remains highly important but quite often you can retrofit explanations to an AI system’s output
• furthermore human understanding is generally limited to “Key factors” and “ranked by importance” rather than anything more complicated hence the need to map onto such a framework when explaining it anyway
• how retrofitting works
• the explosion of data sources and the implications – eg satellite data
• implications of this for the field – excess choice isn’t always a good thing even if barriers to entry have been lowered
• spurious correlations in neural nets cf hallucinations in generative AI
  • notable examples being that the number of Nick Cage films correlates with the number of drownings in US swimming pools
• autopilot systems cannot be generative systems due to reliability challenges – it doesnt matter if you get a wrong chat response it does if you crash into a tree
• the artificial media hype cycle as well as emergence thereof in social media
• future developments
• hottest tip/best bet – quantum computing + machine learning
• what would be a huge surprise – sentience (a category error as per 2023 New Year Special)
• ChAI developments and moves into Insurtech and productisation for producers in hedging real world exposures

And much much more

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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 State Centralism (which is leading to so many problems).

Most FS-savvy folk know that a dollar when the Fed was created in 1913 is worth a few cents now – not a great testimony to the performance of an institution whose job is to “protect” the dollar. Few appreciate the intimate connection between monetary collapse and societal collapse. Examples however are  legion with perhaps the best known being Rome (see what I did there re legion? :-D) , Revolutionary France or the Weimar Republic. As the fallout from those were respectively a civilisational collapse in the West that literally took centuries to recover from and two brutal dictatorships we would be well advised to pay attention to this otherwise recherché topic.

Central Banks are profoundly antidemocratic and as we saw in 2008 in the US and the UK chose – unlike Iceland – to bankrupt their people in order to preserve the wealth of banks and bankers bonuses. Prima facie they seem to correlate to the greatest frequency of wars ever, higher inflation and government spending and a de facto tax on savers and the elderly. At a minimum there is a difficult charge sheet for them to address.

150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Mario who runs the highly successful YouTube Channel maneco64 is a long term student of the history and current practice of monetary policy as well as like me decades ago having worked successfully in the City without having any real understanding of money per se.

Mario joined us a year ago in LFP197 to discuss “Money in the 21stC: Ballooning Printing of Fiat/QE/”MMT”/Govt Debt, CBDCs, Crypto, Dedollarisation, Hyperinflation, Gold”. In this episode:

• Mario updates us on what has happened over the past year re money and multipolarity and where this is all going
• we dive into an assessment of – simply put whether Central Banks Are A Good Thing
• Mario outlines what he would do to rebuild society and money if in a parallel universe he was Governor of the Bank of England or indeed if western money and societies collapse and need to be rebuilt
• Mario looks forward to how Gold is becoming more important in a multipolar World. Central Bank buying of Gold was at its highest level in 2022 since 1967 and China has started releasing its monthly purchases thereof

Topics discussed include:

• Skiing this year in Switzerland
• the moves in China re money, gold, exchanges over the past year
• multipolarity growing rapidly – Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia
• comparisons of the UK losing global dominance of sterling and the US and the dollar right now
• the catastrophic impact – even to the US – of its freezing of Russian Central Bank reserves in 2023 – a jumping the shark if there ever was one (even in WW2 the Reichsbank Reserves were not frozen…)
• A thousand years inflation in England and the huge correlation between inflation and war and having Central Banks
• who controls the Central Banks? The fact that opinions differ widely in itself is a great pointer to a democratic deficit
• Central Banks and permanent war
• cf sound money, small government, no wars, peace
• permacrisis allows ever-more land-grabs by the State
• the median wage of the bottom 10% in the UK is lower than in Slovakia
• drilling in to the phrase Central Banks – the Bank of England’s role has eg varied hugely since its formation in 1694 – there are many possible roles of a Central Bank
• the fractional reserve and creating money out of thin air existed vestigially from the start
• “lumbering the debt from the monarch to the people” – prior to the BoE the monarch was personally responsible for war debts – the BoE was the start of a process of moving war debts from the accounts of the King who started them to the people who didn’t
• monetary policy in Anglo Saxon England – shaving of coins and the role of Kings in producing standardised money
• William Cobbett (see below) who 200 years ago wrote of how having a Central Bank makes fighting wars much easier
• AHM Ramsey a critic of the BoE who wrote a critique forecasting doom from the possibility of Private Banks to create money out of thin air in an inverted pyramid
• the origin of the expression “pay through the nose”
• what is the opposite of having Central Banks? How would Mario operate as the Governor of the Bank of England?
• multiple options at a detailed level
• the opposite of monopoly is competition
• abolishing legal tender laws
• challenges of transitions between monetary policy regimes – and in large part hence Napoleon and Hitler
• 16thC as private money worldwide and the origin of the London money markets
• comparisons between revolutionary France monetary situation and western economies today
• Alan Greenspan, future Federal Reserve Chaiman:
  • “An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense-perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire — that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.” 1967
• Mario’s Crystal Ball for 2023 and future trends
• China and Russians motivation
• Maneco’s sponsor shoutouts:
  • Affiliation with @ITM TRADING, INC.  FREE Gold & Silver Wealth Strategy Call With Lynette’s Team https://calendly.com/itmtrading/maneco64 or call 866-989-4368
  • Use promo code maneco64 to get a 0.5% discount on physical gold and silver bullion purchases at https://www.goldinvestments.co.uk/
  • Use referral code Billy or maneco64 at Miles Franklin Precious Metals Investments: https://www.milesfranklin.com/
• and last but not least we don’t even have time to dive into the Bank of England’s role in the demise of PM Truss via its announcements and timings and handling of LDI issues for pensions where even US State Federal Reserve officials have commented that this is obvious (see The Critic article for example)!

• Recommended books:
  • David Graeber’s “Debt – The First 5,000 Years” (amazon.co.uk) especially on the inevitable collapse of fiat monetary schemes going back to the Bible
  • William Cobbett “Paper Against Gold; Containing the History and Mystery of the Bank of England, the Funds, the Debt, the Sinking Fund, the Bank Stoppage, the Lowering and the Raising of the Value of Paper-money” (1815)
    • Cobbett wrote the first volume of 28 Letters while in prison for two years (1810-11) for opposing the flogging of some militia men. It it a history of how Britain funded the war effort against Napoleon by increasing the national debt, suspending the use of gold, and using paper money. Cobbett also chronicles the economic hardships imposed on ordinary working people by the disruption of trade, war taxes, and inflation of the currency. 
  • Two key book references on the connection between monetary policy and social collapse:
    • “Fiat Money Inflation in France” Andrew Dickson White (free pdf)
    • “When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany” Adam Ferguson (amazon.co.uk)

And much much more 🙂

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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 that these terms (eg crime, terrorist et al) vary per location – a real challenge for global enterprises.

Annis.jpg">Annis-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Finally we move on to a particular speciality of Ripjar (who recently completed a $37m raise) – adverse media screening  – which is not – as it sounded to me – a PR function but rather the automated processing of billions of news articles for credit/regulatory/business relevance re, as it were, early-warning/detection of say credit or regulatory or ethical problems with clients while these are still over the horizon rather than at the front door (or inside it) of the business.

Topics discussed include:

• bearing crosses – jetlag and karaoke/Christmas parties
• GCHQ roots and centre of the highest levels of technology and smart folks
• BBC Micro (computer) and Defender
• GCHQ one of the three intell agencies in the UK
• the impact of 9/11 and the “war on terror” – esp at a technology level the nature of the hugely challenging questions of automation of intelligence gathering from internet content
• defining terms – the importance, slipperiness and relative nature around the world – theory and practical impact for clients
• adding to the above styles of media writing vary per geography as well multiplying the technological challenge
• major focal points of crime for Ripjar from the hardcore to the softer end like corporate malfeasance which can be much more relative
• the realpolitik is that companies need to follow local laws and regulations as well as add on their ethical layer (if they have one lol, not all do…)
• from a practical perspective re solutions Ripjar give the flexibility for clients to define/search as they wish
• what is like working at an intelligence agency
• the multiple challenges of transitioning from a government intell agency to a startup/commercial environment
• the challenges of a life spent focusing on criminals – from Nietzsche’s “stare long enough into the void and the void stares back into you” to not implicitly as a person seeing the whole of humanity as potential criminals
• the value of creating a startup in this context
• intell agencies culture of spinning-out and being open or not – GCHQ and Israel agencies as Case Studies
• helping governments understand the spread of ISIS propaganda and giving the ability to take down horrible material
• tracking the emergence of online extreme behaviour
• the huge range of industries that Ripjar has worked with and how this broadens their perspective
• the core relevance of the FS industry in terms of setting good practice/leading edge approaches to data and criminality
• data siloes as a real issue
• ransomware – including situations where it has been deployed to hospitals or emergency services :-O
• the connection between some ransomware activities and State-level players
• detecting and analysing ransomware
• how data sharing would make this sphere so much the better
• adverse media screening
• wide use cases
• automated reading of news articles and screening them for risk factors for the business
• early-warning signals in open-source material
• the 40 year database of 18 billion news articles
• the challenge of the narrowing of the overton window on leading topics to – in western media at least – key The Current Topics having no diversity of angle
• broadening this to a bifurcation – Brexit, Trump etc
• what percentage of practical issues are grabbed by this phenomenon
• the ability to potentially measure this change in discourse over recent decades
• probabilistic measure of what might be “the truth”
• practically-speaking for lower-level credit-related events say there may not have been a narrowing of the window and indeed eg with reporting of court cases there was not much breadth in the first place as that tends to be factual
• 0.9% of total news articles in the database have relevance to topics Ripjar’s customers care about
• measuring/modelling a “3D Overton Window”
• the time-factor in interpreting data and the evolution of data at a practical level for banks
• fake news
• Jeremy “fully expects ChatGPT to be used to write media articles in the future”
• the need to include this in the algorithms/approach and to filter out machines created information
• commercial shoutouts for RIpjar and Labyrinth their decision-support platform
• 71% growth in their business in 2022
• longer term plans

And much much more

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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:

1. Metapolitical Awakening
2. Psychological Awakening
3. The Wasteland and the Grail
4. Existential Awakening
5. A Magical New World

There is a huge shift in consciousness going on now. The old world is dying in front of our eyes. However a new world is arising and there are a phenomenal number of green shoots growing for those who will look and find.

Let’s take a journey from understandable disenchantment and toxic metapolitics, through  an examination of the deepest roots and causes of this disenchantment in ourselves, in our civilisation, in our hugely increased use of technology, to a world of re-enchantment.

Don’t choose the old world, fear and control, choose the new world of love, light and healing…

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So yet another fresh topic we haven’t covered so far What is the role of a CLO – Chief Legal Officer – aka General Counsel in a Tech firm in general, as a superset of Fintech? Back in the day, well quite a few days ago most all companies used external lawyers almost entirely. At a certain point the concept of in-house lawyer appeared. Since then the number of laws has only mushroomed and the whole world of regulation has exploded massively. To cut a long story short there is an ever-expanding need to “square the circle” where the circle is the businesses creative desires and the square is the Lilliputians’ zillion and one Rules That Must Be Obeyed At All Times.

Gill.jpg">Gill-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">It is perhaps this need more than anything which has driven the evolution of the in-house lawyer into becoming a CLO/General Counsel as to get the optimal outcome someone needs to deeply understand both a specific business with its idiosyncrasies and desires as well as the law/reg thing.

So in this episode we dive into the world of a CLO with Harj who is GC at the LiiV Group and will leave you all with some feel for what type of company when should start considering creating another box on the organogram, another chair around the C-suite table.

Topics discussed include:

• tech machines “updating” themselves
• Formula One and domestic racing simulators
• data-driven racing
• driving at Monza
• Harj’s career journey to becoming a Tech GC
• Private Equity and SAAS businesses
• the evolution of GC/CLO roles in the US and in the UK
• the variation in the usage of the terms
• the motivation behind this evolution
• the cyclicality of the growth curve
• reporting lines and moves to reporting into CEOs
• how many laws are there?
• the move from ~”document creation” to more creative/business re-engineering mentality for GCs/CLOs
• using SAAS as a Case Study for the difference between having a GC/CLO and simply outsourcing to external lawyers
• legal issues where one invariably needs to go outside
• impacting eg sales cycles
• difference in incentive alignment
• how do you measure the value-add of the legal department
• the challenge of getting a sensible bonus approach for “defensive” functions – esp varieties of risk (market/credit/legal/compliance etc)
• why the tech world is different… eg rate of change
• data and challenges therearound
• defensive and creative aspects of risk management of all types
• which types of companies should have a CLO/GC?
• what are the criteria to consider?
• how importance is good governance in any given org and how would this function relate to that?
• trend to pivoting from CLO to COO as a litmus test of how things are deeloping
• explanations and shoutouts for the Liiv Group
• digital anthropology and the “why?”
• Liiv’s portfolio of companies

And much much more

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Ricardo is a Brazilian serial entrepreneur who joins us in this show to give us an overview of the key features of Fintech in Central/Southern (aka Latin) America. The region includes the worlds highest valued neo-bank which has reached an astonishing 65 million client base in less than a decade – most of whom never had a bank account before, so amazing things are happening down there.Which are the major players out of the nigh on three dozen countries? What are the trends. What historical and geographical features lie behind the patterns we see? How do Latin American Fintechs expand beyond their home territory?

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Pismo is a Brazilian Fintech who provide core banking technology globally and who raised an impressive $108m B round last year… it only seems like yesterday that $10m was an impressive for a B.

They have offices in many countries around the world and for example power N26 neobank in Europe.

Topics discussed include:

• Brazilian proposals
• the recent Brazilian elections and a brief overview of Brazilian politics
• what gets Brazilian annoyed re the lumping of countries into Southern or Latin America
• quick historical overview
• was Brazil discovered “by accident” or “on purpose”?
• decomposition of Spanish empire vs Brazil remaining whole
• different ethnic proportions depending on the relative histories of Latin countries
• as with much of global politics now there are high levels of polarisation and plenty of craziness
• right-leaning candidates tend to be more pro-multi-polar world
• Ricardo’s career journey from investment banker through to serial entrepreneur
• Banco Garantia Brazil’s emulation of Goldman Sachs
• the impact of a visit to Californian Finmtechs
• funding Pismo in 2016
• are Central and South america different regions?
• where does the Caribbean fit in?
• migration between neighbouring countries especially in Spanish-speaking Southern America leading to business connections
• Braizl is very separate from the rest of the demi-continent due to linguistic differences
• what does the American phrase “Hispanic” mean? Is Ricardo a Latino as he doesn’t speak Spanish?
• Mexico, Brazil, CHile, Argentina as the major players
• Lat Am population is ~640+m
• Brazil is ~215m and Mexico ~130m – so together they account for half the population of Lat Am
• Brazil has about 60% of total investments in Fintech
• many countries too small to attract Fintech investment
• regulation varyong greatly and leading to very different outcomes
• Brazil being lax in re has led to greater creativity
• 55% of Lat Am population are “underbanked”
• during the pandemic there was an increase in the use of cash :-O
• Brazilian Nubank (formed in 2013) – the world’s highest valued neobank (~$65bn) – is Lat Ams largest bank with ~65m regular clients, 80% of whom use it as their primary bank account, and most of those didn’t have a bank account before
• the lower limit for Fintech banking
• the major role of the Brazilian regulator in not being strict that led to this explosive performance
• examples of Argentina and Fintech
• Chile and digital wallets
• Mexico is the second most important market with strong regulation framework
• two major divisions of Fintech in Lat Am – “payments and rails” and “lending structures”
• corruption and political stability and consequent economic stability
• expansion within the region
• very little global expansion – Nubank and Pismo are more the exception than the rule
• as a comparative Case Study it took Pismo much much less time to deploy their system in India than it did in Argentina
• geography counts way less than other factors in Fintech establishment
• an overview of Pismo’s products and services and many offices around the world
• Pismo’s current direction

And much much more

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