Fintech Finance Podcasts: The FF Salon
FF News | Fintech Finance presents... well.. what is turning into a selection of creative, innovative spins on B2B podcasts! Kicking off with the ”FF Salon”, we interview some of the best and brightest in Fintech... while at the same time, cutting, styling & ”zhuzh”ing their hair; giving us much more intimate and deeper insight into what makes these executives and companies tick Coming up... - Carpool Conversations @ITC - The FF Salon @Sibos
Episodes

Monday Jan 16, 2023
Monday Jan 16, 2023
In today’s Virtual Arena tune in to a discussion led by Alessio Castelli from CBI, on how Open Finance is finally creating huge value-added services across the industry. CBI have worked on their Global Open Banking Report to provide us with the best facts and figures on Open Finance currently.

Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
For this special Virtual Arena, we welcome two experts in digital finance and banking, Peter-Jan Van De Venn, the VP of Global Digital Banking at Mobiquity, and Brett King, celebrated author and self-proclaimed futurist, to discuss the future of digital banking, what fintechs and legacy institutions should be focusing on and how banks can spend their budget wisely amid economic uncertainty.
“We have seen obvious pressure in 2022 on fintechs, “ says King. “The message to banks and incumbents is clear; you can’t take the foot off the gas pedal yet. A lot of the benefits that we’ve seen with successful fintechs like Wise, Nubank, WeBank, in terms of their utilisation of cash, have set a benchmark and changed the way analysts talk about the sector.”
The growing issues of climate change and employment will no doubt go hand-in-hand with future innovations in digital transformation and AI. The financial services sector is now taking on a whole new group of challenges and startups and incumbents alike must be adaptive and agile enough in their operations to keep up with new changes.
“Many banks still feel that they are very special and that their requirements are extremely different to other banks. Looking at the research that we have done, amongst 80+ digital banks in the world, it shows that about 80% of the functionality that is brought to customers is common,” said Van De Venn.
We are currently in an era of homogenisation, where banks offer almost all the same products. When thinking about the use of a banks budget, one of the biggest goals in 2023 is to develop out-of-the-box differentiators so that industry leaders can really stand out.

Friday Jan 06, 2023
Friday Jan 06, 2023
In this exclusive Virtual Arena titled: ‘How to Scale a Fintech Organisation’, FF News’s Taylor Griffin sits down with leaders Aaron Holmes, the CEO of fintech SaaS provider, Kani, and André Silva, the Global Head of Expansion at Revolut, about scalability in the financial services sector, and some of the goals and challenges businesses need to consider before taking their leap into expansion.
“Consumer financial services products are built on trust. It is essential that consumers know that they can trust their organisations with their money.”
Scalability is one of the most important KPIs a company considers when they think about growth.
From regulation and compliance to cultivating the right team that can foster global innovation and still have their finger on the pulse of local and regional cultures – successfully scaling a fintech involves openness to adaptability and a strong infrastructure that was already established before scaling was even a thought.
“For us, [Revolut] scalability was always a key part of our DNA,” said Silva. “It was what we set ourselves up to do – but at the same time, cementing our processes and working in the UK at the forefront of fintech regulation gave us the opportunity to cement our processes and build a tech that we could scale globally.”

Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
eCommerce has unleashed a world of almost unlimited choice. Now, consumers can shop with a host of different merchants online, with the incentive that their purchases will be fast, secure, and easy to follow.
This level of speed and security can be attributed to the growing customer demand for instant and varied payment options and the infrastructure fintechs and merchants are building around global eCommerce and payment tokenisation.
In this Virtual Arena, we explore the dynamic relationship between retailers and financial services providers and the increasingly interconnected ecosystem that holds modern eCommerce together. For this discussion, we are joined by some of the industry’s strongest payments and infrastructure builders; Alex Gatiragas, the Global Head of Digital Solution Experience at Giesecke+Devrient, Kurt Schmid, the Marketing & Innovation Director of Secure Digital Payments at Netcetera, and Alex Page, the VP of Solution Consulting at FIS. We interrogate the use cases for payment tokenisation in online payments and how security is insured in an industry where daily transactions are in the tens of millions.
“One of the areas that issuers are looking at right now is the self-service of tokens and provisioning of tokens into merchants. So a particular user journey could be; they apply for an account, they get their debit card, they put it in their favourite wallet, and they are also given the opportunity to put into their favourite merchant as well, which saves the double handling of having to go to the merchant and change your card details,” said Gatigaras.
We are going to see an increase in network tokenization. The merchant, on their part, has cottoned on to the fact that the key differentiator for online shopping is the simplicity of the payment journey. Today, all customer behaviour can be boiled down to one prerequisite: convenience.

Monday Dec 12, 2022
Monday Dec 12, 2022
The introduction of ISO 20022 marks a watershed moment for the financial services industry. This rapid migration to this new standard will mean institutions will finally be able to track exactly where their transactions are in the payments journey and that corporates and small businesses alike will have access to an equal and interconnected system in which to communicate freely.
Heading stateside in this episode of The Paytech Show, the FF News team get acquainted with banking’s biggest financial leaders and infrastructure experts who are working to make ISO 20022 a successful transition for businesses. In the energetic city of Chicago we talked to Ravi Sharma, the Business Manager of the global safety science company, UL Solutions, and over in New York City we virtually met with Isabel Schmidt, the Co-Head of Payments Products at BNY Mellon. We discussed the different needs institutions have in their banking operations and why the adoption of the new standard will ultimately benefit the end customer the most.
“Financial messaging is all about this massive amount of data and information exchange, where there is a sender and a receiver and they share a common language,” said Sharma. “When we look at ISO 20022, it was originally launched in 2004, and compare it with the most widely accepted message today, ISO 8583 – that came in 1993.”
Often institutions have had to develop additional components to add to the function of the old 8583 standard. With years in the making, ISO 20022 is finally being integrated into systems with the hopes that it will remedy the current banking ambiguities in transparency and speed.
“Legacy payment experiences were about moving money from A to B, and not worrying about anything else,” said Schmidt. “We cannot take that approach today, it must be centred on giving clients solutions that are simple, quick and transparent and keeps them in control. That means the payment solutions today must be conceived end-to-end, and in many cases, span across multiple product vertices within a bank.”
ISO 20022 not only attempts to repair antiquated banking systems but challenges financial institutions to stretch to new technological heights in the realms of high-volume transactions and real-time cross-border payments. By developing ISO 20022, institutions now have the space to get creative.

Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
Joining us at the FF Salon for Sibos 2022, we chat with Travers Clarke-Walker, the Chief Marketing Officer at Thought Machine, about the different generations of core banking technology and what it truly means to be cloud-native infrastructure builders.

Friday Dec 02, 2022

Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Joining us for the FF Salon at Sibos 2022, we talk to Solange Chamberlain, the Chief Operating Officer, of Commercial Bank at NatWest, about how the banking sector can progress ESG efforts. More banks are setting out targets to get to net-zero, and for Chamberlain, the use of consumer data points around individual carbon footprints will play a big part in getting that.

Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Joining us at the FF Salon for Sibos 2022, we have Manoj Mishra, Vice President, of consulting firm CGI, about banks and the risk of irrelevancy they face if they do not adapt to the new digital-first environment of modern finance. For Mishra, banks need to eliminate the ivory tower mindset and meet customers where they are – modern consumers are a lot more active with whom they decide to bank with and will choose based on how convenient the experience is.

Wednesday Nov 30, 2022
Wednesday Nov 30, 2022
In this ecosystem that champions partnerships, banks, tech startups, and governmental institutions alike have opened up for collaboration and communication on an increasingly level playing field. This enthusiasm has sparked a new demand from payments, where customers have more control over how they pay, and get paid.
In this exciting new Virtual Arena, we welcome Abhish Saha, the CEO of Sandstone Technology, Simon Lynch, the Founder and CEO of Cymonz, and Simon Eacott, the Head of Payments at NatWest Group, to discuss the evolution in international payments and using new technology to build infrastructures that can support numerous use cases for all types of customers.
“If we’re talking about international payments, it’s as big as the market gets,” began Saha. “I think there is always room for more players and more competition, and having worked with financial institutions in Africa in a past career, it was interesting how innovation can create something in one country and can impact neighbouring countries in a positive way.”
Cross-border payments are changing in a big way, with companies facilitating transactions with the use of local networks region by region, emerging competitors are now sharing the market with leaders like Swift and Visa – driving further possibilities for collaborative growth and consumer satisfaction.
“I still believe that, as a customer, I generally want to do my banking with a bank, and international payments are a key part of that experience. When I actually transact away from my bank, I’m adding another hop for myself where I need to take the money out of my account and to my provider,” explained Lynch, on the changing role of a bank.
Though there is an influx of new competitors in the payments industry, that does not mean the function or presence of the bank is compromised. In fact, legacy banks of the like of NatWest and Santander have shown their commitment to technology innovation through their partnerships and investment in the fintech sector. Hence the homogeneity of our current ecosystem, with incumbents agreeing that to get ahead, they too need to adapt.
“It is about being where your customers are, being on the platforms that they’re on, and making the payment on the back end of it almost incidental,” added Eacott. “You’ve got to look hard at the entirety of the customer experience and the customer journey and see where your own strengths are and the parts that you play as a bank and the value that partners and fintechs can bring.”