London ❤️s FinTech

Welcome to London Tech Weekly. Each week, we’re going to highlight a startup or VC firm in London that’s doing cool shit. And see some of the deals that’s happened right here in London in the past week. If you’re looking for something to do, check out my pick at the end.

This week is about FinTech, a sector close to my heart (because I work in it) and why the UK has many success stories.

I’ve been seeing a buzz around the number of consumer apps coming out of France. It makes sense, people say, France is a cultural capital. Which makes me wonder about the UK. What’s our thing? Well, it’s not as cool as France’s, but we are very good at it. And that’s FinTech.

I’ll start with an anecdote. About nine years ago, a friend told me about a ‘bank’ that offered a pink card with zero charges when spending abroad. You’d top up the card, so it had more of a pre-paid card feel. It felt perfect for a trip I was going on, so I opened an account with Mondo and my card arrived two days later.

Fast forward and Mondo is Monzo, they’re actually a bank, they’ve got nearly 9m customers and I still have the pink card in my wallet. It’d take a lot to get me to move from them.

Monzo are only one of many success stories (and to the naysayers, they are now profitable).

There’s Starling and Revolut also for current accounts, PensionBee and Penfold for pensions, Moneybox and Plum for micro-saving, Emma for budgeting and Tide for business banking. There are many more that I’ve missed here.

And this success is arguably thanks to regulators of all people.

For financial services in the UK, the biggest regulator is the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) - they’re the body that governs how firms treat their customers. They’re the folks FinTech startups have to keep on side. And thankfully, they’ve been quite helpful. In 2016, the FCA launched the regulatory sandbox. As one of the first regulators to do this, startups could test new products and business models to real consumers in a controlled environment. All of this is done through their Innovation Hub programme.

They’re also pretty tough. And that’s a good thing (libertarians, hear me out). I can speak from experience about how mindful we are at work of the FCA in everything we do. One thing you don’t want is to do something that causes them to come sniffing. And that adds legitimacy. By being regulated by them, it increases consumer confidence in the startup.

Unfortunately, the FCA aren’t quite what they used to be. They’ve gotten slower and stricter with the FinTechs they onboard. My friends at Form have detailed this (and much more) in their manifesto to Fix The Regulators as a whole. 

As well as a forward-thinking (albeit now slow) regulators, FinTechs benefit from London being one of the world’s financial capitals. So there’s a wide-range of expertise and talent available, all with financial services knowhow whether that be across operations, legal, engineering and more.

London’s (and the UK’s) FinTech scene as a whole benefits from standing on the shoulders of giants. Those giants being how deeply entrenched the City is in global financial services industry.

What happened last week?

• Sorted, a recycling tech startup, raised £1.65 in seed funding.

• Treefera, AI-enabled data management, raised $12m at Series A.

• Elvie, a women’s health startup, raised £9.6m.

• Blue Skies Space, satellites for data analytics, raised £2m.

• Healthkey, a healthcare benefits platform, raised £1.13m in seed funding.

• Skyports, a vertiport infrastructure operator, raised £88.6m at Series C.

Harry’s pick

An underground Roman cult temple right in the City? Yep. Head to Bloomberg Space to check out the London Mithraeum. It’s free to visit and the experience lasts about fifteen minutes. What’s crazy about it is how such little is known about what the people there would do, the historians essentially go 🤷 

It’s one of those places that reminds you how special this city is.

Advance, Britannia

In this unstable world, real ones know that only innovation and technology can protect our democracies. So it was great to see the first ever London Defence Tech Hackathon happening last week. I regret not making it, the video below gives an overview if you missed it like I did. Keep your calendar free for October 19th and 20th.

With defence spending recently announced to reach 2.5% of GDP by the end of this decade, we’ll hopefully see some streamlining in defence procurement so that Britain can produce its series of next-gen defence primes.

Long live the cause of freedom.