[In response to another superb piece of thought leadership from Tom Noyes – thank you sir for sharing your well structured thoughts with the world – you are a gentleman and a scholar.]

If you haven’t read Tom Noyes’ recent blog on CBDCs, please start there first (see link above). I was responding to his piece and then hit the comment box character limit.

I agree that potentially CBDCs could turn banking upside down. I also do recognise the potential to displace the traditional role of the card networks in certain use cases.

I wonder however how quickly consumers will…

My perspectives on what it takes to build a successful club from a standing start, and some lessons learned to share with others embarking on their own Clubhouse journey

In effect this is a quasi how-to guide for those who want to:

• Build a better club on Clubhouse
• Understand how notifications work on Clubhouse
• Consider the pros and cons of building member vs follower counts
• Get greater audience numbers into your rooms

[NB All @addresses below are Clubhouse handles that link to Twitter profiles where available – Clubhouse profiles are currently only accessible from within the app.]

Background

Patrick (@PatrickSayers 🙌)…

I just read this article on p2pfinance news about the bad debt situation facing a number of retail investors on the Crowdstacker marketplace lending platform. Collectively the investors are facing substantial losses of up to £7.5m with the unfortunate demise of BurningNight, a bar and nightclub operator.

I remember meeting the team behind Crowdstacker. At the time I was impressed that a relatively new and unknown platform had secured an enormous amount of crowd investment for their first few deals, as well as a relatively quick path to FCA authorisation and regulation.

But then I remembered what a co-worker had…

If you live or work in one of the major cities of the world, you’ve probably found it difficult to avoid this slogan plastered to the side of a building that’s either being built or remodelled.

This banner is inescapable because wework, a company that has taken a relatively simple business model for flexible office rental (effectively a 21st century Regus), is expanding at an incredible rate on a global scale. wework create co-working spaces for individuals and companies to use as their offices, with all the sleek, modern design and facilities craved by start-up and scale-up companies, who are…

It has now been 500 days since the consultation period closed on 18 March 2016 for FCA Discussion Paper DP15/7 “Our approach to SMEs as users of financial services.”

At present, the provision of financial services to small businesses in the UK is largely unregulated. In many cases, firms can’t even appeal to an ombudsman if they have been poorly treated.

According to the FCA’s own web page, no public update has been published by the FCA on this issue since their review was launched on the 27 November 2015. …

Business finance providers currently use different ways to represent price, such as X% (per month), or by only showing £ repayment amounts, making it hard to compare costs across different providers.

This was an issue I felt strongly amount when I was CEO at Growth Street, the first revolving credit marketplace in the world. Growth Street matches investors with UK businesses looking for an alternative to a bank overdraft. We took the decision early to be fully transparent on price, including full disclosure of the Annual Percentage Rate (APR), which compares the full cost of finance (i.e. …

This post is first in a series navigating the FinTech landscape, with a focus on the UK.

This month London played host to a number of large events focused on FinTech. The Innovate Finance Global Summit, “the world’s biggest celebration of achievement in FinTech”, kicked off a government-backed “FinTech Week” of speeches, panels, workshops and showcases, with ministers, CEOs from companies big and small, professional service firms all sharing the limelight.

I’m often asked by those that don’t occupy this FinTech bubble, what is FinTech, and why all the fuss?

The term FinTech has been on the rise in the…

I’m no Nate Silver, nor do I aspire to be, an albeit fictional, Joey Lucas type. I don’t have access to banks of private polling data. I’m an intrigued amateur who predicted the 2015 result (a Conservative majority) with a 1% (3 seats) margin of error, while most of the professionals got it badly wrong. So I thought I’d chance my arm again.

My prediction

Overall I predict the following result for the General Election 2017:

• Conservatives 338 (+8 seats)
• Labour 210 (-19 seats)
• Liberal Democrats 44 (+35 seats)
• SNP 31 (-23 seats)
• Others 27 (-1 seats)

This would give the government…