4 ways building a Fintech startup is like a premier league title race
Warning: This article compares football to Fintech. If you are not a fan of tenuous links between two seemingly unrelated things then avoid this. You have been warned Part of my day often involves thinking about how to explain complicated subjects and concepts. My go-to is usually a simple to understand analogy, for example, “Building […]
Under the hood: The Merchant Payment Process
A month or so ago (although who can really keep track of time nowadays) I drew up some diagrams showing a basic merchant payments process. I also overlaid a Pick ‘n’ Mix of vendors which could be used to build a challenger bank in a modular way. When I posted the images I wasn’t ready […]
5 challenges of building an MVP
So, for the uninitiated, we’ll start at the start. MVP is the acronym for Minimum Viable Product. And it’s pretty much what it say’s on the tin. Creating a product in it’s smallest, feature lean form and that still demonstrates the core of what the product is. Tech companies have done this for years with Twitter, […]
The Rise and Rise of the ‘Challenger’ bank
If you’re anything like me then you have a little orange/hot coral card sitting in your pocket ready to pull out and show off. At least, that was me a couple of years ago sparking comments like ‘Oh that’s a nice colour. What’s it for?’ and ‘Is that actually a bank card?’. Nowadays those questions […]
The Reality of Artificial Intelligence
In Hollywood, the vision of Artificial Intelligence includes Skynet controlling our nuclear arsenal. Robots in ‘I, Robot’ designed to help us in our daily lives. Or Ultron from the Avengers as “A Suit of Armour Around the World”. The theme for you movie lovers out there will be clear in these examples. AI is bad […]
The True Size of BIG DATA (and a note about Brexit)
Data comes in many different forms which most people recognise. Numbers, text, images, video and sound are the commonly used ones. ‘Bits’ represent these different forms in computing which can be binary values of either 1 or 0. 8 Bits represent 1 Byte which can store numbers and letters (simple data forms). Storing images needs […]
China’s ‘Black Mirror’ Social Credit Solution
If you’re a Black Mirror fan you may have seen the latest offering from the brain of Charlie Brooker called Bandersnatch. It’s an interactive video game style episode exploring the concept of choice as well as cause and effect. Whilst this latest episode might not have direct parallels with real life previous episodes have foreshadowed […]
The Spreadsheet Conundrum
The origins of the first mainstream spreadsheet can be traced back to the late 1970s (yes spreadsheets are nearly 50 years old) when a primitive version of what we know of now was available to Apple ll and IBM PC users under the banner of VisiCalc which contained all of the core features we still […]