FinTech West Webinar 11-2-21

On Thursday 11th February we hosted the latest FinTech West webinar, with guest speakers from Evershare, Graphchain, FINOS and Bristol Open Source FinTech Group.

Julian Wells, director of Whitecap Consulting & FinTech West, chaired the event which as usual ran for an hour and contained a mixture of regional updates and FinTech speakers.

Click here to watch the recording of the FinTech West webinar

FinTech West future plans

Stuart Harrison delivered an update on the future of FinTech West, outlining plans to expand its reach and impact to help support the development of the South West FinTech ecosystem and drive the economic growth that FinTech can help deliver to the regional and national economy.

Plans include the delivery of more frequent events, including seminars, webinars, roundtables and an annual conference; stronger links to the other regional FinTech ecosystems in the UK, and international locations; forming an advisory board to provide insight, support and guidance; and an aspiration to create an Engagement Manager role to provide support for marketing, event management, business development and relationship management. These plans will be funded by sponsorship and other initiatives including annual partnerships, but FinTech West will remain a non-membership organisation with events free to attend to all. Anyone interested in finding out more should email info@fintechwest.co.uk

Sign our letter to Rishi Sunak!

In partnership with the other members of the FinTech National Network, FinTech West is also currently putting its support behind a letter to the Chancellor to call for regional FinTech to be supported in the soon to be published UK FinTech Strategic Review. We want to get as many signatories as possible – please add your name here.

 We heard from three guest speakers at the event:

Tim Hegarty, Founder, Evershare

Evershare uses Open Banking technology to enable low-cost cashless donations for charities – an area that has become increasingly topical during Covid. Annual donations amount to £10bn per year, and Tim explained that Evershare is 75% cheaper than any other donations platform in the UK.

QR codes are central to the proposition, and each charity gets its own QR code which can be used anywhere, online or in print. This eradicates the need for any physical payments devices to take payments.

There are 168,000 charities in the UK and Evershare is about to launch a marketing campaign to raise awareness and develop the business.  

Chris Carr, Founder, Graphchain

Chris provided an informative update on the evolution of blockchain and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).

PwC has estimated that estimates 10-20% of global infrastructure run on blockchain based systems by 2030, but Gartner previously estimated that 90% of the current enterprise blockchain platform implementations will require replacement by 2021. Chris highlighted that ‘blockchain 1.0’ has issues with speed / efficiency, energy consumption, and scalability.

Chris explained that when developing Graphchain, the idea was to look at the current base layer, and strip it away to its essentials, adopting a (DAG) of data instead of a more rigid blockchain. Graphchain is a scalable, fast, and green DAG solution based on academic research. The system is designed to be collaborative instead of competitive like in other chains. This collaboration method means it drives out the need for the monopolies controlling the systems and instead allows individuals to take part in the system if they desire, increasing the decentralised aspect. It is also focusing on efficiency, striving for green technology that does not have the environmental impact that some current blockchain systems have.

James McLeod, Community Director, FINOS

Bristol Open Source FinTech Group is organised by FINOS and Scott Logic. It aims to expand contributions to and consumption of open source technologies, while growing a healthy engineering community in the financial services industry.

The Bristol group has been set up following the success of groups in Edinburgh and London. The meetups are usually face-to-face events – during the COVID-19 pandemic, the groups have continued online. Bristol events are planned when conditions allow.

James also discussed open source technology, highlighting how linear development has been replaced by agile, fast paced, efficient DevOps engineering – delivered on a continuous basis.

More information about getting involved in the FINOS community can be found here.

Following the presentations there was a short Q&A session before things wrapped up.

NEXT EVENT

The next webinar will be on Thursday 11th March – sign up here.

Stop the press - Lumio is crowdfunding!

Adrian Shedden, co-founder of Lumio, sent us this message:

As a Fintech West business, we’re super excited that we’ve already had over 260 people pre-register to invest over £180k.  Together with over £400k of angels committed, Crowdcube believe we’re well on track to overfund to the magic £1 million!

This will enable us to really establish Lumio in the UK and expand to Ireland by the end of the year.  Together with our signed distribution agreement with a financial institution giving access to 1.5 million customers, this all puts us in a great position for growth and a fantastic Series A as we race towards our mission of growing 1 million customers’ money by 2024.

You sharing with the Fintech West community and asking for small investments and shares will build on our momentum to smash the £1 million crowdfunding target.

Pre-register for the campaign here: Lumio crowdfunding pre-registration