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Blog 5: Don’t Be Late To Scale

In this blog, I reflect on the importance of timing in innovation. Last month, I shared that one thing I have learned is that there is no good time to innovate, just as there is no good time not to innovate. I want to delve a little deeper into this subject now and talk about the importance of timing your innovations. I’m coming a bit late to writing my blog for May. Part of that is due to share of mind, with the evolving COVID-19 crisis being a constant drumbeat. Part of that is also due to a lot going in my own small part of the world, with some major ups as well as downs. However, what all has this served to reinforce is the essential insight that time and our perception of it, is relative, not absolute - and so how we shape and use that time is a vital and important question. In the FinTech world, timing has been a hot topic over the last few weeks. For example, the timing of Monzo’s new capital raise and Tom Blomfield’s decision to step away from being CEO and become
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Blog 4: Is It The Time to Build?

Marc Andreessen, founder and venture capitalist, generated energetic debate this week with his latest essay . Called ‘It’s Time To Build’, it makes a passionate case for a restatement of the American dream and using the current crisis to redirect effort towards that dream. He argues that through aggressive investment in new products, industries, factories, science, and in big leaps forward, we can ‘build’ solutions to the biggest challenges in housing, education and healthcare - as well as solving less ‘rocket science’ problems like lack of medical equipment and lack of systems to disburse financial support. While Andreessen’s scope is broad ranging and speaks to the purpose and activity of a nation, it prompted me to ask questions about the more specific worlds of banking and payments. In particular, when is the right time to innovate and what should we be innovating on? The ‘when’ question is possibly easier to answer. Having worked in innovation for some years, one thing
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Blog 3: The Consumer in Lockdown

In this third blog, I want to share some views on what the Coronavirus lockdown could mean for consumer behaviours, payments and FinTech. In this period of lockdown, consumer needs will not go away - but how we meet and access them could change radically. Whilst much is being written on crisis management , we should not lose sight of the strategic implications of what could be a profound change in how we live our lives and our relationship with digital technology. I had planned for my March blog to write about the excellent NextGen Payments Forum in Malta where I gave the opening keynote. However three weeks is a long time in 2020 and the singular thing top of everyone’s mind at the moment is the global Coronavirus pandemic. It therefore seems most timely to write some initial thoughts on how the crisis may impact consumer behaviours, and therefore payments and FinTech. Upfront, I should state that I am no expert on epidemiology so cannot offer any views on how the virus will p
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Blog 2: Being the customer

In this second blog, I want to share some thoughts on why, as an innovator, literally being the customer is so important to successful product development in today’s world. It all starts with curiosity. Being curious about the products and services customers are actually experiencing. In the pre-digital era, this curiosity manifested itself for me in popping into the branches of different banks. It was instructive to see what products they were offering, how the staff were serving customers (were there greeters at the front, for example?) and how the customers were using the branches. During the transformation of retail banking in Romania in the early 2000’s, I learned that the results of this kind of mystery shopping could be surprising - but vital to understand what was really happening on the ground! These days, this curiosity takes the form of signing up to every new digital experience, simply to try them out. Just for banking, on my iPhone, alongside my main app, there a
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Blog 1: Convenience isn’t just for London

In this first blog of 2020 I want to reflect on the consumer trend of convenience, and how I see it playing out in the world of payments. As I’ve spoken about before, mostly recently at  FinTechConnect  in December, the story of 2019 in payments was that the trends that we’ve been talking about for some time are actually happening. In particular, there is a secular shift underway from cash to electronic forms of payment. We see this happening in the UK where, according to UK Finance, debit card volumes overtook cash in 2017 - in other words, we are well past the tipping point. The shift to debit being is driven by the dramatic growth in contactless, now at over £6bn a month, up 33% year on year. This shift is not only happening in the UK: other countries such as Sweden and South Korea are well ahead, whilst in the US where contactless has historically struggled, issuers are starting to rollout contactless cards and there is increased merchant acceptance. For example, the New Yor
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