Ep. 281. Insights: 2018 in Review

You might’ve seen on Twitter we’ve been running an advent calendar of the 11 Days of Christmas, with our top things from across fintech and banking in the last year.
Today we’re going to take a deep dive on those:

Open Banking. The initiative launched almost exactly a year ago on 13th January and it's not exactly an overnight success. The CMA9 were not ready, but fintechs and FS providers welcomed it. We take a look at how far we have come since it began.

We take a look at GDPR, if anyone was ready, how successful it's been and what effect it'll start to have in 2019 and if the acclimatisation period is truly over.

2018 brought us a horde of fintech unicorns. We examine how it happened and what it means for investment in fintech for the future.

Borderless accounts. Transferwise borderless bank accounts launched back in April, allowing customers to “bank like a local” in multiple currencies. Revolut are also competing in this market with their free international transfers, could this be the next area of innovation?

Mettle was launched in 2018! It's delivering forward-thinking banking for SMEs and it was launched by us with Natwest and Capco. SME’s have been long ignored in terms of FS innovation, 2018 saw the rise of SMB solutions, will this continue over to 2019?

Speedy, smooth onboarding processes. A huge shout out for Monzo, KBC and Onfido for seamless onboarding utilising technology to complete KYC checks smoothly and without effort or paperwork on the behalf of the customer. Finally onboarding is becoming painless, how will the bar be raised?

We also saw Monzo and Starling grant purchase blocking capabilities for gambling. It seems like fintechs are the ones leading the way in protecting customer welfare.

11:FS Foundry launched. The ability to bypass legacy infrastructure to deliver digitally-native propositions to scale and at speed is going to revolutionise banking and we're making it in partnership with DNB.

Good personal finance management tools finally came into play this year. Yolt, reached half a million customers in 2018. Spin off brands/features from incumbents, eg ING and Yolt now exist. Plus the rise of Venmo in the US means that PFM has changed for the better.

Monzo IFTTT. Monzo became the first bank to integrate IFTTT back in June. Engineer Simon Vans Colina gave us the exclusive with a demo of how it works. Users can move money between their account and savings pots according to any rule at all. Examples included a swear jar, £5 whenever someone goes for a run, a bonus when their favourite football team won. We love the limitless possibilities of what customers can do with their money.

Branding reached a new level and there were plenty of bizarre stories. Meowing cards, a rat with a taste for cash and so much more. This year has seen so many odd things happen. Let's hope that doesn't stop next year!

Produced by Laura Watkins. Edited by Alex Woodhouse.