Edward Sherrington

Has the killer app for Open Banking just got one step closer? The Payment Systems Regulator has just announced plans to expand Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs). VRP's have long been touted as the successor to the UK's incredibly successful Direct Debit payments, however their rollout has been met with a number of challenges. We're not there yet but this statement from the PSR is very encouraging. 1️⃣ Beyond Sweeping: We've moving from "me-to-me" payments to using VRP for recurring payments for utilities, government services, and subscriptions. 2️⃣ Widening Participation: The mandation of participation for the 9 largest banks and building societies in the intiial rolloutof Open Banking was crucial to getting the ball rolling. Many non-mandated FIs quickly followed suit but the PSR is supportive of widening the mandate to ensure broad adoption. 3️⃣ Pricing Models Under Scrutiny: The debate on API access pricing continues. Will we see a centralised approach, or will the market decide? 4️⃣ Liability and Consumer Protection: The industry is still grappling with these issues. The PSR's approach here could make or break VRP adoption. The real-time nature of OB VRP's will open new fraud vectors for scammers to exploit. 5️⃣ User Experience is Key: Remember, over 65% of users abandon complex checkouts and this has been a barrier to adoption of existing OB payments. VRPs promise simplicity - but can they deliver? As the payments landscape evolves, staying ahead of these changes and their implications is crucial for managing risks and seizing opportunities. https://lnkd.in/eDkbpjx9

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🎙️ Exciting to see Matthew Ford, founder of Sidekick featured on the 11:FS Fintech Insider podcast! Matt shares insights into the fintech landscape and the innovative journey of Sidekick. A must-listen for anyone interested in the future of finance. 🚀 Check out the episode here: https://lnkd.in/enFSkTGF #Fintech #Innovation #Sidekick

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A great question here.

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Kuberno, the global legal entity management SaaS provider, has closed on an additional £6 million of financing from Nasdaq Ventures and Barclays, concluding its Series A round with £9.5 million of total capital raised💸 Since closing on the first tranche of funding from Nasdaq Ventures in March 2023, Kuberno has delivered 3x annual revenue growth and quadrupled its headcount to support rapid global expansion, including the launch of its US subsidiary in Q1 2024. 👇 Read more below 👇 #StartupsMagazine #Startups #Entrepreneur #Funding

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“Bad regulation doesn’t mean regulation is bad.” June is a busy time for #Fintech folks. I’m at Fintech Week London today hearing about the importance of right size regulation as an enabler of innovation and a driver of inward investment from Lord Holmes. #Fintech #OpenBanking #Payments #Regulation

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🎉 2024 has been a year full of excitement about #SEIS, but especially one story stood out: Onfido’s acquisition by US payments giant Entrust – a huge win for the UK startup scene, and also the SFC Angel Network, which has seen investors making returns of 100x. Back in 2012, Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy, and Ruhul Amin secured seed funding following one of SFC’s first Crocodile Lair pitching events, and then incubated at SFC’s offices. Fast-forward to today, Onfido has grown significantly and has exited in what has become one of the biggest UK tech exits to date, earning it the ‘Exit of the Year’ title at the UK Business Angels Association Awards. Husayn has since become an investor in SFC Capital’s funds himself and already raised the pre-seed round for his new business – Quench.ai . The edtech platform helps companies empower and upskill their workforce – lessons Husayn learned during his time at Onfido. This shows the power of the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme in backing early-stage founders, but also the significance of platforms like Home Grown Club and Home House to make these rewarding connections happen. 📖 Read the full article in our blog: https://lnkd.in/gGyKkdcB #seedfunding #startupinvestment #Onfido #Entrust Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA) Capital at risk. For professional investors only. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

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74% of B2B SaaS product managers have a built-in payment wallet on their roadmap… I am a big fan of Gibson Biddle’s DHM model on how to build products that delight customers, in hard-to-copy & margin-enhancing ways. With embedded finance product managers of B2B SaaS companies have the opportunity to hit the three areas. Delight your customers by removing and automating steps in their job-to-done. Create a hard-to-copy advantage by seamlessly weaving fund flows and data into your customer’s processes. Improve your product’s margins by introducing new revenue streams. Interested to learn more? Get a copy of our latest white paper here:

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🔥Hot off the press! Our Head of Trading, Charlie Rexstrew, wrote an article on Cyprus Business News about why businesses turn to crypto payments. Find out: ➡️Insight on crypto payments ➡️Explanation of why businesses choose them ➡️Why businesses benefit from them Check out ‌Charlie’s fascinating insights here ➡️ https://lnkd.in/ebFMGTwm And let us know what you think in the comments.👇

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Monzo's impressive valuation of $5.9 billion underscores the growing confidence in fintech, driven by strategic fundraising and market expansion. The secondary market sale not only rewards employees but also signals robust investor interest, positioning Monzo favorably against competitors like Revolut. As neobanks evolve, their ability to provide liquidity while delaying a public offering could redefine startup financing strategies. Continued focus on U.S. and European markets will be crucial for sustaining growth and competitive advantage. #fintech #neobanks #startupvaluation #monzo #secondarymarket #banking #crossborderpayments #financialeducation #Payments #openbanking #digitalbanking

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📈 Primary Portal, a fintech innovator focused on digital infrastructure for equity capital markets, has raised €8.9m (£7.5m) in Series A funding. This investment round was spearheaded by @DB1 Ventures, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Börse Group, with contributions from Dutch Founders Fund and Flow Traders. Founded in London, Primary Portal plans to use this funding to enhance its services by linking asset managers' order management systems with banks, enabling seamless straight-through processing in capital markets transactions. The company currently serves 90 banks and 400 institutional investors, and will further expand its analytical data solutions to provide cutting-edge AI-driven analytics. John Bentinck van Schoonheten and Ilan Leshem, the founders, expressed enthusiasm about the collaboration with Deutsche Börse, highlighting its role in advancing connectivity and digitization in the capital markets. With more investors expected in a second close later this year, Primary Portal is set to revolutionize how digital solutions are integrated into market operations. #Fintech #CapitalMarkets #Investment #DigitalTransformation #PrimaryPortal #AI #Analytics #TechNews #EquityMarkets #Innovation 📊🌟 Read more: https://lnkd.in/dkVH455r

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How will disputes change after the changes to the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program are introduced in April 2025? 👉🏽 VDMP and VFMP will be retired in the Visa Europe area, and replaced by an updated VAMP. 👉🏽 New transaction count-based metrics will combine fraud and non-fraud disputes. 👉🏽 Compelling Evidence 3.0 and Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR): These will not count towards threshold calculations. Acquirers and merchants we've spoken to are now looking to invest more in their dispute resolution. There are now more incentives to use the pre-dispute networks and fight them with compelling evidence. Issuers should watch out for an increased representment volume and make sure they are set up with RDR. Read more about it through the link in the comments ⬇️

Embedding fintech means making hard tradeoffs 2010 fintechs succeeded when they combined new tech, reg, and biz model elements into a cohesive and novel whole. 2020s fintechs will succeed if they can align a set of fragmented and complex incentives up and down the value chain. These conflicting incentives are clearest when viewed through the lens of a platform that’s deciding whether to embed financial products for their end users. The platform’s incentives are a good lens because they’re literally in the middle of the value chain. They share some incentives with the embedded fintech provider above them and their users below them, and with their infra provider’s partners and users’ customers by extension. Platforms must make trade offs between three factors when choosing an embedded fintech provider: - Ease of ownership — Is it easy for the platform to implement and maintain the embedded fintech product? How much of the technical and regulatory burden do this have to bear? What kind of specialized functionalities (like risk, compliance) do they need to staff up? - Good unit economics — How will the embedded product change the platform’s unit economics? This is more than the upside of revenue share, but the potential downside of credit and fraud losses. How is that shared across the value chain? - High acceptance rate — This is a non-obvious one to many platforms who haven’t launched financial products before with credit, fraud, and regulatory risk. If a platform will promote a product, they want it to be available and accessible to a good portion of their users. These factors are in tension with one another. You can’t change one without it affecting the others. This is what I call the “iron triangle of embedded fintech”: you can only optimize two factors at most at a time, and improving one necessarily degrades a third. An embedded product that has low cost of ownership and good unit economics likely achieves that by cherry picking the lowest risk and highest profit users and rejecting the rest, leading to a low acceptance rate and thus a poor UX for a platform’s end users. A product with a low cost of ownership and a high acceptance rate likely focuses on onboarding quantity over quality users, leading to losses and poor unit economics over time. A product that has a high acceptance rate and good unit economics likely requires significant upfront work and ongoing optimization by the platform to make the financial product available to many users but also avoid losses, leading to a high cost of ownership. Source Matt Brown #fintech #embeddedfinance #payments Leda Florian Alex Ali

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We were very lucky at Form Ventures to speak to Simon Taylor for our latest Form Playbook! Simon is one of the best writers on UK fintech and his insights about the FCA, the future of payments, open banking and so much more are well worth a read. #fintech #startups #regulation #fca #payments

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The bill pay space is getting incredibly competitive! It is useful as a way to lock in SMBs who use more profitable Revolut products (e.g., Card spend), making it harder for a SMB to switch to a competitor (need to switch not only your Card program but now all your vendor payments if you leave). The downside of yet another competitor in this space is that it puts added downward pressure on the yields of some of the payment methods that generate profits (FX, RTP), This makes bill pay as a whole less profitable, and eventually makes the whole proposal a loss leader to capture and retain SMBs. One example is the price SMBs pay to use real-time payments in the US. Currently, pricing averages ~1% to a vendor wanting to get their payment immediately through RTP. As competition increases, this will drop, to the point where an aggressive competitor may get to flat fee pricing (e.g., $10). At that point, RTP as a profitable payment method within the bill pay suite goes away...

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My Comment on the FT website: The good news is that fintech innovation is going to assist the process: House builders build to traditional market conditions. Let's innovate to provide less complicated ways to a) Provide the capital to accelerate house building from non traditional sources. b) Introduce new pathways to home ownership that are less complicated that shared ownership or staircasing models or horrible schemes such as that provided by intervention such as Help to Buy or even worse: expensive deposit support solutions. c) Provide renters with a way to keep pace with the house prices as they try to save for a deposit. d) Reform planning (which is actually the number 1 priority to ensure the cost of building is actually viable; as fact lost on those who constantly moan about developers making profits and e) STOP the constant answer (by the least knowledgable in sector) of "we need to build more social housing" for as important as that is for the least fortunate in society, it also condemns residents to a life of rent, no effective asset wealth creation and therefore sets the fuse going on the future and ever growing burden of care in later life. The good news is this: There are people out there right now working on this as Air BnB and the Booking dot coms of the world did to transform the travel and tourism sector. Simplicity is key. ROE also. But what is happening, as Black Rock's Larry Fink is well quoted as noting, is the coming of W3 and the tokenisation of real world assets. This will revolutionise the residential real estate sector; introducing efficiency, liquidity and new forms of mobility into the complex housing sector that is currently a beautiful example of the opposite and one there to be significantly disrupted. https://on.ft.com/3wde9Dj

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Adyen now has 25 platforms processing over €𝟭𝗯𝗻 annually 🤯 Up from 17 the previous year. Stripe recently announced they had 74 Connect customers processing over $1bn annually. Nice catch Nicholas Thomson 👌(https://lnkd.in/dnVUPMVc) Does anyone have more stats like this from other Payments companies? #payments #paytech #digitalpayments #fintech #fintechindustry #financialtechnology 

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September is gone. It came with quite a lot of interesting, yet under-the-radar news from FinTech and VC spaces. Here’s FinTech Wire 67 - our curated list of the most interesting recent developments: Outward VC has raised €60.5M to help early-stage FinTech founders. The UK VC firm will lead pre-series A funding rounds up to £5 million. Qonto, a French neobank, is expanding into four new markets - Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Qonto is also looking into M&A options. Apple is finally opening up its NFC payment access to third parties. This means banks, neobanks, and other providers will soon be able to leverage Apple’s pay technology. AKUR8, Frech InsurTech has raised €107.8 million Series C round. The company aims to accelerate the growth of its next-gen actuarial platform. Paybyrd chooses Mangopay to optimize merchant payment experiences. Mangopay’s customizable e-wallet and FX capabilities will boost Paybyrd’s payment services across Europe. Minna Technologies has been acquired by Mastercard. The company’s payment scheme services enable customers to manage subscriptions efficiently across the web. Bitlayer, Singaporean Crypto FinTech completes $9M Series A Extension. It will be spent majorly on product development, especially on the launch of Bitlayer V2. InDebted has completed a $60M Series C capital raise, valuing the digital debt collection company at $350M. Monese will be acquired by Pockit. Still pending the FCA approval, the newly-formed alliance aims to create a platform serving lower-middle-income customers in the UK and EU.  Fifth Dimension AI has raised $7M in Seed Funding. The company aims to scale the genAI solution and transform the document-heavy workflows in major real estate firms. Cariqa has raised €1 in Pre-seed funding. The startup plans to launch a consumer-facing EV charging marketplace. Full #FinTechWire 67 (September) is now out on our website: https://lnkd.in/d-uSPes6 

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