100,000 signatures for the Pension Dashboard petition
38 Degrees recently launched a petition in response to media reports that the Pensions Dashboard might not go ahead.
The report suggested that MP Esther McVey, the work and pensions secretary, was thinking of ditching the pensions dashboard due to more pressing priorities.
100,000 signatures
The petition has now reached 100,000 signatures, showing the depth of feeling and the support that the initiative has in the country. It also means that it can now be considered for debate in Parliament.
The benefits of the Pensions Dashboard are easily seen and have clearly struck a chord with people.
Anthony Rafferty, Managing Director at Origo said: “We at Origo have been passionate supporters of the Pensions Dashboard since the initiative was launched, believing it is essential to help individuals engage with their retirement planning, particularly in the new pensions environment which was ushered in with the pensions freedoms.”
The technology is ready
The technology was recently successfully tested on 15 million users. It is now ready to be implemented and used by customers and financial planners. It is seen as a vital tool with people working on average 11 jobs in their lifetime and struggling to keep on top of their various pension pots.
Anthony Rafferty added “We believe the Pension Dashboard is a superb opportunity for Government and the industry to provide a simple way for UK pension holders in the country to track their pensions, understand their value and what that means for their future and where appropriate, to act on their data in their best interests.
“The DWP Feasibility Study into the Pension Dashboard is expected to be published later this year which we hope will reflect the strong support the initiative has both within the industry and with consumers.”
Nexves, a plucky FinTech startup exceeding all expectations of what your Bank Account is Capable of
Who is behind Nexves?
I am Chris Herd, founder of Nexves. I am an entrepreneur who believes the internet and technology should enable the world to be a far better place. I have led multi-million pound international refurbishment projects, startup growth across an entire nation, sat on the board of directors for a social enterprise managing £80m worth of housing stock and advised a number of businesses on their growth strategies and innovation initiatives. I am bootstrapping Nexves while continuing as a semi-pro footballer in the highland league.
Our principal engineer has seen first-hand what we are up against. A former senior developer at JP Morgan Chase, verteran of the US military cyber security space and a few personal startups, Trey is leading the charge on the implementation of our product vision.
Our investor is a veteran of disruption. The founder/CEO of, perhaps, the most disruptive Scottish unicorn of the last decade, we believe we have the right mix of expertise, passion and guile to leave a mark on the industry.
Why did you decide to launch your own fintech?
About a year ago I was in the process of deciding my next career move. While talking to Venture Capitalists, MBA Programmes, Large Startups and investors it became clear that my vision of the world was radically different than the future most of them saw. That inspired me to explore the things I was seeing in far more detail. I had the offer of investment in a few product ideas I had previously conceived but during further research phases with potential consumers it became clear that what I was trying to create was a feature of a platform and not the product itself. Those conversation helped crystallise the idea for Nexves in my mind.
At the same time, I was beginning to spot patterns of issues experienced by my family and friends. Why was my Grandmother paying 3X what my parents were for the same service from Sky, my brother paying 2X more than I was for the same mobile phone contract, or my sister paying more for her flat insurance than I was for my house? Fundamentally, I surmised, these were intelligence problems which could be solved by technology. Who had the information needed to fill these knowledge gaps? Our banks. Open banking in particular inspired me to dream of potential application, enabling innovation which was previously impossible.
Banks were facing their own problems. Interest rates have plummeted to levels which are borderline offensive while making us poorer (interest lower than inflation) and governments are overseeing legislation which ensures the wealth gap continues to widen. When I considered the implications of all these things it became clear that a financial platform could operate at the intersection of spending, saving, investing and tokenisation which would let us harness the power and influence of large-scale collaboration. Banks have hundreds of thousands of customers, imagine group purchasing on an industrial, national then global scale. All we require is technology which enables that collaboration or organisation of action and that is what we are creating.
So what is Nexves?
The future of money and the internet. We are innovating around existing products and services to provide ramp to participation in that future with as few obstacles as possible. We realise that the majority of the world is going to wake up tomorrow and begin using a cryptographically secure wallet or cryptocurrency, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t provide opportunities for them to be exposed to these things.
Phase 1 of that plan involves 3 parts
Part1 sees us tokenise interest on the money stored in your wallet, reinvesting that capital in asset classes reserved for the richest 1%. On your own you can’t personally invest in startup companies, commercial real estate, private equity or a number of other assets. Together we can not only invest in these things but actively influence their success while simultaneously growing our wealth. The tokens you receive will be equivalent to your proportion of funds on the platform as a whole. Have 10% of the money on it? You will receive 10% of the user distributed tokens equating to 10% of user ownership of the fund and any future returns. What this establishes is an asset-backed hard currency.
Part 2 see’s the establishment of a comparative data product. Where phase 1 enables us to create the digital currency, phase 2 lets us use it to purchase the data necessary to make it intelligent. Where you have sky TV we would pay you to reveal which packages you have. We will then benchmark your spending against every other user on the platform. Where you are paying more than someone else for the same thing we will tell you how much you could save and how to do it. This wouldn’t be true only for sky, but every recurring expense you have. Eventually this free service would give birth to a premium product which undertakes these negotiations automatically on your behalf.
Phase 3 creates an influence market place. Imagine 100,000 people sharing a similar message on their social media profile urging their follower to download an app we are invested in or 1m people embarking on their local supermarket to demand they stock a product they are invested in. By paying people to act in their own self-interest everyone else benefits and that is revolutionary.
We are currently working out the mechanics of the platform but anticipate a full launch of the service before Christmas.
One final thing, how would you like to earn free bitcoin? Use Nexves to purchase certain products and services online and we will literally give you free bitcoin as cashback. You get to begin using it without ever having to buy any.
So, what is Nexves? Everything you need from a bank, but more than you’d ever expect.
Discover MoneyMatix, a new fintech with a social purpose
Who is behind MoneyMatix?
I am Tynah Matembe, Co-founder of MoneyMatix, and a director for the high impact Scottish Charity, Passion4Fusion. I am an entrepreneur who believes that by earnestly seeking excellence, the world will be made a better place reaching heights unimagined.
Both ventures are due to my love for community, wealth and family. I am a Saltire fellow, a chartered banker and a lawyer by training, I have extensive corporate experience in financial services, and internationally working for organisations such as the United Nations. I have 2 beautiful children and a doting husband. I love traveling and own a scratch map which I intend to have scratched off a bit of each continent by the time I am grey.
Helene Rodger, my co-founder @MoneyMatiX is also a Saltire fellow and director at Passion4Fusion her background is in Project Management and Mental Health. She has worked with young people most of her life and her passion to see them succeed keeps her committed and inspired to make a difference. She is also a doting wife & mum to three beautiful children. She loves traveling, networking, dancing and listening to motivational audios.
With our combined experience we set out to create a children’s buddy that would help young people visualize the cause and effect of the choices they make with money.
Why did you decide to launch your own fintech?
Through our personal family lives and our work with Passion4fusion, we identified a gap in financial capability and enterprise education among people migrating to Scotland. We were especially concerned by the lack of good financial role models in these communities and we were already seeing patterns of how a lack of financial guidance was distorting young peoples assumptions about money and aspiration.
We are blessed with a proactive team @passion4fusion so when we shared our observations it became inevitable that we solve the problem. We created a project under passion4fusion which was the birth of MoneyMatiX.
When we created MoneyMatiX, our intention was to empower our immigrant community by raising a generation of children who would be mentored to become financially stable and independent. We quickly realized that financial illiteracy is a universal problem not unique to immigrants and with this, our vision for MoneyMatiX changed to create a sustainable & universal business solution that will impact global households and nurture generations of financially stable and responsible individuals.
Could you explain what you mean by financial illiteracy and how it’s a universal issue?
I and Helene are both originally from Uganda but met in Scotland a place that has become more than home to us.
Being from Uganda and moving to Scotland has given us a 2-sided view and perception of money. In Uganda, we were raised albeit in different households within an entrepreneurial and cash-driven environment. If you needed anything you had to have physical cash. So, you planned ahead and laid strategies for how to acquire money. It was a “CASH 1ST BUY AFTER” mindset.
To build our Family home my parents planned a phased build where they allocated and linked funds from specific business ventures towards the home building phases. The same happened with tuition & basic needs, my parents had a business whose profits were directly allocated to our school fees and needs. You can imagine the culture shock when I migrated to Scotland and received the 1st of hundreds of letters saying we could buy Sofas on credit. I thought it was a prank. And they didn’t stop coming, “YOU QUALIFY FOR A LOAN”, “BUY NOW, PAY LATER” and on and on.
So, when my then 7-year-old daughter Kaylah started asking to buy stuff, I knew I needed to do something about her mindset. Kaylah is a beautiful eloquent girl who believes her daddy is a Demi-God that can fail at nothing, (probably true if I am being honest, he is a fabulous guy) But our next issue arose therein, Kaylah’s daddy had this magic card that provided anything and everything from flights to any place in the world, to restaurant visits on a whim, daddy’s magic card was so special it bowed at daddy’s command. So, work and money in Kaylah’s mind were secondary in nature for people sired by ordinary men. In her case “luckily” they were under her daddy’s reign and she, therefore, would never have the need to plan for them.
To put this in perspective, ask yourself this, would you trust 2.7 billion pounds with someone who did not know what they were doing? According to the global service & finance review, Children in the UK receive 2.7 billion pounds in pocket money without financial guidance. This is the tip of the scale of the problem of financial illiteracy and how it becomes ingrained in young people. The money Advise Service reports that most financial habits are formed by the age of 7 years.
So what is MoneyMatiX?
MoneyMatiX is an integrated set of financial capability tools designed to teach young people the value of money and entrepreneurship. MoneyMatiX products enable communities to raise young people mentored to become financially stable and independent.
Via a Social Gaming platform, MoneyMatiX teaches young people key financial and entrepreneurial concepts and empowers them from key stages to take control of their character and money sense.
The platform applies gamification to decision making by mimicking real-life scenarios to teach children how the financial decisions they take would play out in the real world enabling them to understand financial choices with ease and confidence.
Further to this, we run MoneyMatiX kidpreneur hackathons. These are challenge competitions which give young people an opportunity to work collaboratively in small teams to identify and consider entrepreneurial solutions to current social and economic problems.
The programme draws on the latest research from the University of Edinburgh and is underpinned by MoneyMatix. The events are designed to provide a practical application for financial literacy and business skills and together with our mentors, we give young people an opportunity to meet role models they can aspire to.
We are intentional about where we run the hackathons and whom we partner with because for us everything about these events should be a wow example for children can take away and conceptualize for their future.
We believe that every child has a right to a secure financial future so our mission is to make financial security a reality for the next generation.
DemoFest 2018: Bringing Research to Life
This blog was written by Steven Kendrick, Executive Officer for the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), which represents all 14 Scottish HE Computing Schools/Departments. Steven is responsible for all aspects of the management of the Research Pool.
As the warm summer continues, we are already looking ahead to our main knowledge exchange event of the year “DemoFest: Bringing Research to Life”, which takes place at Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh, on the evening of 6th November.
The event is aimed at showcasing some of the leading Computing and technology research taking place within universities in Scotland; and it is aimed principally at businesses and the public sector.
DemoFest brings together research talent, businesses, the public sector and Government for an evening of avant-garde technology demo’s; engaging talks and networking. This year we expect over 250 industry delegates; with over 50 research and tech’ exhibits and two great keynote talks (Dr Jamie Graves, CEO of Zonefox and Ali Shah, Head of Technology Direction at the BBC.
Because of the breadth of research and technology under the roof, DemoFest is aimed at businesses of any size, operating in many sectors ”“ including but not limited to Finance, Telecommunications, Cybersecurity, Big Data, Robotics and AI, Space Technology, Gaming, Energy, and Health & Wellbeing.
The event is now in its 11th year and the benefits of attending are far-reaching. It can be an opportunity to sow the seeds for innovative collaboration between universities and businesses. It can spark the commercialisation of a brilliant idea and begin the path to establishing a successful business. It also puts employers into contact with some of the brightest people working in technology in the country and vice-versa. For researchers and academics it provides a platform to discuss their research and demonstrate technology working in real-time.
FinTech Scotland Announces Board Members
FinTech Scotland has today announced the board members who will work with CEO Stephen Ingledew and team to oversee the strategic plans for making Scotland a top five global fintech centre.
The details of the board members follow on from the announcement last month confirming the new chair of FinTech Scotland, David Fergusson, the Chief Executive of Nucleus Financial.
The board members represent a cross section of the fintech economy, including representatives from the six recently announced strategic partners.
The board members are:
David Fergusson (Chair) – Chief Executive, Nucleus Financial
Jude Cook – Co-Founder and CEO, ShareIn
Hugh Edmiston – Corporate Services Director, University of Edinburgh
Louise Smith ”“ Head of Design, RBS
Linda Hanna ”“ Managing Director, Scottish Enterprise
Kent Mackenzie ”“ Partner and Global Head of fintech in Scotland, Deloitte
Anneli Ritari-Stewart – Managing Director, iProspect, Dentsu Aegis Network
Melba Foggo ”“ Managing Director, UK Consulting, Sopra Steria
Yvonne Dunn ”“ Partner, Pinsent Masons
Neil Cunningham – Partnerships Director, Equifax UK
Paul Ryan – Director of Watson Artificial Intelligence & Data, IBM
In addition, the following will attend board meetings in an observer role:
Maggie Craig ”“ Head of Scotland, Financial Conduct Authority
Karen Rodger ”“ Head of Financial Services and fintech Policy, Scottish Government
Commenting on the board appointments, Stephen Ingledew said: “I’m delighted with the diverse range of experience and expertise we will have around the Board table to guide us in taking forward the FinTech Scotland plans. Each individual is passionate about making fintech a major success in Scotland and, at a personal and collective level, they will provide wise counsel and guidance in driving our core values of collaboration, innovation and inclusion.”
The first board meeting took place on Tuesday 26thJune, reflecting on the last six months and focussing on strategic priorities for the rest of the year.
FinTech Scotland announces additional strategic partners
FinTech Scotland announced the appointment of IBM and Equifax as additional strategic partners.
IBM: The company has been leading the way in terms of AI for many years now with Watson, the AI platform for business, powered by data. As an AI system, Watson can turn unstructured business data into actionable insights that enhance decision making. AI is playing a major role in the development of innovative and disruptive fintech solutions, allowing for seamless processes for customers and companies dealing with finances.
Equifax: Data is the fuel that will drive innovation and it was therefore important to partner with a global data insights provider. Equifax, have a rich heritage of helping companies develop innovative solutions underpinned by market leading consumer and business data.
The addition of IBM and Equifax means that FinTech Scotland has now appointed six strategic partners following last month’s announcement confirming the selection of Pinsent Masons, Deloitte, Dentsu Aegis Network and Sopra Steria.
“Today marks the start of a promising collaboration with Fintech Scotland to grow innovative solutions and practices” said Paul Ryan, Director for Watson at IBM. “This is particularly significant as financial organisations look to further incorporate data and AI insights to provide a better service for their customers and stakeholders, from boosting customer engagement, creating conversational agents or even supporting client representatives as they interact with customers.”
Neil Cunningham, Partnerships Director at Equifax, said: “The Fintech Scotland vision aligns perfectly with our own
aspirations to be the de facto bureau partner for data driven innovation. Increasingly our customers are looking to
us to help solve their problems by creating unique solutions in collaboration with fintech partners. I think we’ve all
been impressed by the blend of complementary strategic partners Stephen has been able to assemble, and excited
at the potential to drive innovation through collaboration. ”
Stephen Ingledew, CEO at FinTech Scotland, said: “Strategic partners of this quality supporting the fintech ecosystem in Scotland will help us achieve our ambition to be in the top 5 fintech hubs in the world. I’m pleased to have a diverse set of strategic partners and with their expertise and global reach, they will play a crucial role in ensuring Scotland’s position on the world stage.”
Previse named as one of the hottest fintechs in Europe
Previse, the global instant supplier payments decisions company with an office in Glasgow, has been recognised as one of the hottest fintechs in Europe by Fintech50 at an exclusive ceremony in London on Wednesday 20 June.
The Fintech50 is a prestigious list of the top fintech companies in Europe, chosen by an expert panel of leaders from around the world, representing investors, financial organisations, global techs and innovation leaders. Previse was selected from over 1,800 fintechs from all over Europe.
In choosing the final 50, the judges look for companies with a track record as well as growth potential for the future. The list included Revolut, the retail FX company which this year was valued at over £1 billion, as well as a number of well-known fintechs serving institutional investors.
This is the latest in a year of positive announcements for Previse. The company opened a new Glasgow office in October 2017, secured R&D funding from Scottish Enterprise and appointed business heavyweights David Tyler, Chairman of Sainsburys, and British Land Chairman, John Gildersleeve, to its advisory board. It also announced partnerships with the leading provider of digital supply chain solutions, Virtualstock, and social enterprise, Auticon.
Earlier this month, co-founder and CEO of Previse, Paul Christensen, was appointed to Innovate Finance and City of London Corporation’s Fintech Strategy Group. The group has been tasked with driving the success of the world-leading UK fintech sector.
Paul Christensen, CEO and co-founder of Previse said: “We are pleased to be included in this prestigious list of the hottest fintechs in Europe. Being selected out of a pool of 1,800 companies is strong validation of the importance of the slow payments problem we’re solving, how we’re solving it, and our tremendous team.
“Slow supplier payments are damaging the world economy. Every year hundreds of thousands of businesses which are fundamentally sound, creating good jobs and with potentially transformative ideas and products close purely as a result of their cash flow challenges.
“Previse solves this problem by enabling corporate buyers to pay suppliers of all sizes, instantly, making slow payments a thing of the past. We use hundreds of millions of data points and sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to provide a score of a corporate buyer’s likelihood to pay the invoice. This allows funders to instantly release funds to the supplier to meet the invoice. Suppliers get cash on delivery. Widespread adoption of InstantPay will have a major positive impact on the economy.”
Scaling up to meet Pension Dashboard demand
This blog has been written by Anthony Rafferty, Managing Director at Origo.
As the fintech tasked with improving the financial services industry’s operating efficiencies, Origo has been involved in Pensions Dashboard developments since 2014. During this time, as well as developing prototypes, we have also been working on delivering a systems architecture that is scalable to meet the anticipated launch and future usage levels by consumers.
The Pensions Dashboard will be both a brand new and free service pertinent to millions of people in the UK, which means there is a high likelihood that it will receive significant volumes of requests when it goes live.
Indeed, our analysis* shows that Pensions Dashboard must be ready to support at least 15 million consumers accessing their pensions data. This figure of 15 million is also closely aligned with discussions that we have held with providers/banks who operate consumer-facing platforms.
Therefore, the infrastructure underpinning the Pensions Dashboard must be built from the outset to support significant volumes of consumers from day one, cope with peaks and troughs in usage, and scale to the target of 15 million consumers.
Not surprisingly, one of the main concerns of those responsible for delivery of this critical project has been the sheer complexity in scaling up the central IT infrastructure to deal with this anticipated volume of consumers. It is vital that this is achieved securely, efficiently and at acceptable cost to Government and industry stakeholders.
So, a vital part of the work we have been doing in developing the find’ service ”“ the process of the Dashboard which, with consumer consent, orchestrates the calls to all pension providers to check if they have a matching policy for the consumer ”“ has been to successfully scale test for that anticipated usage by 15 million active consumers all wanting to find their pensions.
We have benchmarked our solution against example test scenarios and factors, including:
â— A 15 million user population;
â— 80% of these users active onPensions Dashboard(s) on a given day;
â— Invoking an additional find’ request every 30 days;
â— 200 pension provider systems (or end points’) in the ecosystem.
As Kenneth May, Chief Architect at Origo, explains this required analysis of the performance and stability of the ‘find’ process at high volume. “Averaged out over a day, this testing requires a throughput of just over 1,000 transactions per second to deal with incoming traffic from the Dashboard(s) and to collate responses from pension providers.
“We have tested at more than double this rate to ensure that we can cope with typical usage patterns which have significant peaks during the working day. Our test results give us confidence that we can reliably achieve, exceed and sustain the required throughput and provide a robust low-latency service.”
Needless to say, we are delighted with the progress we’re making on behalf of consumers, with our recent testing proving that the solution scales.
The offering also provides centralised authorisation services to enable Dashboard access to the pensions which are found and includes advanced features such as Delegated Authority (access) for advisers, guidance bodies and other trusted parties
We have not achieved this alone. It has been done working in collaboration with providers and industry bodies over the years, as well as with the support from our strategic technology partners ”“ MuleSoft and ForgeRock. But now, having successfully tested the plumbing of the Pensions Dashboard, for us the technology is ready for 15 million consumers.
LendingCrowd hails record month for deals
Hot on the heels of its recent £2 million funding round, peer-to-peer (P2P) platform LendingCrowd is celebrating a record month of lending activity.
The Edinburgh-based fintech company, launched in 2014 by CEO Stuart Lunn and chairman Bill Dobbie, completed loan deals in May totalling more than £3 million for small businesses across Britain.
Head of Origination Adrian Innes said: “It was a great team effort to get to this milestone, helped by our improved processes and a fantastic working relationship with our community of introducers.”
He added: “Not only was May a record for us in terms of the total value of loans, the number of deals completed also hit a new high, up 40% compared with our previous best.”
In March, LendingCrowd announced that angel syndicate Equity Gap had led a £2m external funding round that also included the Scottish Investment Bank and private investors from Scotland’s entrepreneurial and finance scene.
The company, which is fully authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority and launched its debut television advertising campaign in March, is now targeting total lending of about £40m for 2018 ”“ more than double last year’s figure.
Mr Lunn said: “The support from our investors highlights the progress we’ve made since our launch in late 2014 and the potential for us to scale significantly this year.
“I’m confident that, as we expand our sales and marketing activities, we’ll continue to grow our loan book as more small businesses turn to us for their funding needs.”
LendingCrowd was one of the first P2P platforms to launch an Innovative Finance ISA and all of its investment accounts can be held within this wrapper for tax-free returns*.
*Capital at risk. Tax treatment depends on the individual circumstances of each investor and may be subject to change in future.
Scotland, Ireland and fintech ”“ the importance of working together
This blog has been written by David Clarke, Policy Director and Founder at Scottish-Irish Finance Initiative.
Fintech is a strategically important industry and can contribute hugely to the development of our native industrial and business environment. Most promising is the development of new companies and most importantly new high value jobs. It is also vital to remember that fintech can be a disrupter and can, and should, create efficiencies that may make some existing roles redundant. With this in mind it’s very important to create the right public policy for the development of the sector.
In order to ensure that the balance of new roles and specialisations works in our favour we need to be certain that we have first mover advantage and scale. The Scottish Government has quite rightly taken a proactive step in encouraging the growth of fintech, most notably with the establishment of Fintech Scotland, to coordinate the activities of the policy makers and the industry to ensure we take maximum advantage at this pivotal growth time for the sector.
But why stop at Scotland’s borders? Those of us that support the Scottish Irish Finance Initiative (our raison d’être couldn’t be more clear ”“ to encourage job and industry growth through cooperation) believe there are huge advantages from sharing expertise and effectively doubling the industry hinterland by encouraging the fintech sectors in both locations to work more closely together.
The combination of expertise, which can be led by both universities and businesses, can of itself helps spawn the development of new technologies and new solutions. We are also strongly of the opinion that by businesses looking further afield (but not that far ”“ a 40 minute flight that’s shorter and easier than any trip down to London!) they can tap potential clients and resources that otherwise would not be available.
Ireland’s existing expertise as one of Europe’s top two fund administration and servicing centres, home to many of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions, offers a wealth of opportunity for Scottish fintech companies. Likewise the significant fund management and administration in Scotland extends the potential for Irish businesses.
And at a time when others are putting up trade borders, we reckon that this kind of cooperation sends out a very positive message to the rest of the world and to the large financial institutions that we need to engage with in order to grow our domestic industries.