Can fintech help employees engage with their work pensions?

Manuel Peleteiro, CEO of Scottish fintech Inbest.ai, Ed Owens from Pension Wise and Gavin Marshal, Senior Financial Wellbeing Consultant at HSBC will be on a panel discussing how technology, amongst other things, can help with engagement when it comes to workplace pension.

This panel will be part of a series of event organised around the latest behavioural research into employee engagement with workplace pensions schemes by Dr. Robertson-Rose of the University of Edinburgh. Her research shows how HR practices influence employee behaviour and explains what employers can do to help increase pension scheme engagement.

Each seminar will last approximately one hour and will be followed by refreshments and an opportunity to network.

These free seminars will be of interest to employers seeking to improve the financial well-being of their employees

Book your tickets

Locations	Dates	Venues	Tickets
Edinburgh	15 May, 17:00 ”“ 19:00	University of Edinburgh	Book here
Dundee	16 May, 16:00 ”“ 18:00	Gallery of Contemporary Arts	Book here
Glasgow	21 May, 16:00 ”“ 18:00	University of Strathclyde	Book here
Aberdeen	23 May, 16:00 ”“ 18:00	Society of Advocates Library	Book here

Fortnightly FinTech Fuse ”“ Embracing our role in the European FinTech Team!

My travels and meetings over this last few weeks have again reinforced to me that Scotland’s fintech developments are very much embracing being much part of a wider European team.

With our shared values and ambitions, there are enormous opportunities to work with our European team partners in reinventing financial services through fintech innovation.

This was certainly brought alive on Wednesday evening in Edinburgh with the launch of the ground breaking European Innovation and Technology (EIT) Digital Office with its focus on fintech.

European Collaboration

The new fintech digital office based at the Bayes Centre will deepen relationships between Scotland and Europe, increase innovation and investment in new fintech initiatives, grow knowledge exchange across the continent and attract inward investment.

Working with the EIT team along with Scottish Enterprise, University of Edinburgh, Scottish Funding Council and Highland & Islands Enterprise, it has been terrific to see this initiative international come alive.

It was a privilege to share the platform with Willem Jonker and Morgan Gillies at the launch along with Scottish Government Minister Ivan McKee and Charlie Jeffrey from the University of Edinburgh to explain how the collaboration will boost innovation and investment in fintech.

The atmosphere for the launch was made special by having a packed diverse audience with us representing all corners of the Scottish ecosystem.

Including some of the exciting fintech enterprises such as Tynah and Helene from MoneyMatix, James from Xpand, Loral from Sustainably, Rab from Wallet Services, Daniel from Listings Ledger as well as Kevin from Hylomorph.

The event was a great opportunity to catch up with some of the inspiring people making things happen across Scotland driving innovation such as Poonam Malik, Jude McCorry, David Robertson, Jasmina Lazic, Martin Hughes, Amanda Fergusson and Daniel Broby, Terry Murden.

Thank you to Courtney Garner from SciTech Europa for making the long journey to be with us and to the terrific EIT and Edinburgh Innovation teams for making it all happen on the night.

The European collaboration opportunities were also very much in evident for my recent visit to Brussels with Graeme Jones and Clare Carswell of Scottish Financial Enterprise for a range of very constructive meetings at the EU.

There is so much mutual common ground in developing fintech collaboration opportunities and a huge thank you to the magnificent team at Scotland Europa, Sarah English and Marija Ivoninaite and Fraser Clark from SDI.

It was great to have the opportunity to present on Scotland’s fintech progress with an engaged European audience on the Tuesday evening along with Graeme and John Maciver from Pinsent Masons.

We made a number of great connections and I’m sure there will be many more visits to our European friends in the near future as we commit to work even closer.

I flew back from Beautiful Brussels directly to Glorious Glasgow to present at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries to speak at their knowledge sharing session.

It was wonderful to have a very engaging full house with so many of the profession interested in the role of fintech in shaping the future of financial services.

Thank you, John Taylor and Barry Shannon for inviting me to present as well as to Ji-Hyang Lee and Alan Watson for being terrific hosts for the session. I look forward to repeating in Edinburgh in June!

European Innovation

Europe was very much part of the discussion at the asset management dinner on Tuesday evening with Ministers Derek Mackay and Kate Forbes along with senior members of the investment world.

It was good opportunity to share the examples of how the Scottish fintech community is progressing innovation with the major financial institutions in these uncertain times and highlight the growing global interest in Scotland’s fintech sector.

Thank you to Graham Laybourn and the Baillie Gifford team for hosting the engaging evening as well as for the ongoing support from Anurag Agrawal in exploring new ways to develop fintech innovation in asset management.

There are a growing number of global fintech with a focus on asset management looking at setting up in Scotland due to the depth of Scotland’s investment sector.

Talking last week with Hamish Croll of Singapore based fintech BlueFireAi, there is no doubt the potential in Scotland is very much getting recognized.

The opportunities for fintech enterprises are also rapidly evolving in banking and it was great to catch up with Gary McLellan of CYBG this week to develop how we progress the collaboration opportunities

Thanks also Gary for allowing me to be one of your guinea pigs’ for your innovative approaches to online fintech innovations for personal data security, great to experience at first hand.

The RBS fintech accelerator demo day a week or so ago was another fantastic example of a large institution supporting new fintech innovators.

Inspiring pitches on the day including by Adrian James from Monily, Chris Herd from Nexves, James from Xpand.

It was great to be on the stage with Matt Perkins from FreeAgent and Karen Bird of RBS in sharing insights on developing fintech innovation through collaboration

Fantastic leadership by the RBS team Steve Chown and Janice Cunningham for running such a constructive event.

Unfortunately, I could not stay for all the fintech demos as Nicola and I had to dash off to Glasgow for the University of Strathclyde Enterprise Network event.

Another amazing evening listening to the budding entrepreneurs. I was particularly struck by the innovations coming from the Fing & Pay and Hotei fintech teams, both expertly mentored by our friend and fintech guru Nick Cousins.

Many congratulations to the always inspiring Eleanor Mackay, it is no surprise that Strathclyde has an enviable reputation across Europe when it comes to fintech innovation.

This is invaluable in developing the collaborative innovation opportunities for fintech entrepreneurs across Europe and the world.

European Entrepreneurs

It was super to catch up with entrepreneur Derick James, the founder and CEO of Symphonic, to hear about the brilliant progress his team has been making in Europe and wider alongside the move into the new office in Edinburgh.

Very much looking forward to sharing the Symphonic international innovation story with the fintech community in the coming months.

Similarly looking forward to working with experienced expert innovator George Kelsey with what he is brewing up for the fintech world! Reflecting on my catch up coffee with George this week, I must introduce to Derick James.

I’m thinking it could be another example of one plus one equals five in creating even more fintech innovation in collaboration and what a story that would be!

Last week we shared the awesome entrepreneurship story of FNZ who are a fabulous example of a Scottish based fintech expanding in Europe and worldwide in helping consumers manage their long term savings.

Another inspiring innovation example I learnt about in this last fortnight was Cortex Worldwide.

Terrific conversation with founder and chief executive Peter Proud and such a truly inspiring journey in scaling a market leading technology enterprise. Peter’s experience is invaluable, and I am keen to share to many budding entrepreneurs.

The European and global innovation can come in various forms and I really enjoyed meeting Jordan Stewart of AlbaFX in Glasgow recently and hear how his proposition can help small firms gain the most from international trade.

Very much looking forward to connecting Jordan with the growing fintech community to develop mutual valuable connections.

I had the opportunity to meet Craig Anderson of venture capital firm Pentech in this last fortnight as well and talk through how the fintech community was evolving and the emerging investment opportunities.

In this respect, I also had a very constructive conversation with Andrew Wilson of Charlotte Street Partners on how we could do more to help fintech firms present themselves to potential investors.

I’m hoping that talking about the how the Scottish fintech community of firms is developing will encourage more of the entrepreneurial activity across the country.

So, it was good to be interviewed on Monday by Kim McAllister for a new BBC Radio show which will give live in May on the exciting fintech developments and the impact on people’s lives.

Meeting the engaging media professional David Lee on the same day, who is writing the Scotsman supplement on fintech for May, was a good time to reflect the whirlwind of activity over this last twelve months.

I shared with David that a major strength of Scotland’s fintech progress is our diverse range of people.

Whether this is the data analytic expertise being developed by DataLab and the MBN Solutions team, something which was showcased at Aviva a couple of weeks ago in growing their data centre of excellence.

Then there is the fintech entrepreneurial expertise being developed in our universities

In this respect it was wonderful to share joint plans with Claudia Cavalluzzo and Georgia Goodall of Converge Challenge who do amazing with new entrepreneurs from our universities

The enterprise spirit was very much demonstrated to Nicola and me recently when we were asked to present to the University of Stirling fintech postgraduate students.

A terrific group of people and thank you Andrea Bracciali for arranging the session, really enjoyable and insightful as was the visit to Newbattle Community Campus to see first hand the wonderful progress of this new digital’ school environment

Newbattle is very progressive educational role model for the future and it was absolutely fantastic to spend time with Gib McMillan and leadership team and the inspiring students, in their hands we have a very bright future.

The conversation with David Lee also gave me the opportunity to reaffirm the ambition to be a top five global fintech centre one year into the journey and the importance of working with European and global partners to achieve this goal

European Partners

One such group of partners are of good friends in Ireland and it was just absolutely wonderful to spend a few days in Dublin as part of Scottish Irish Finance Initiative (SIFI) conference on fintech.

Such a warm and welcoming reception from our European partners and the mutual relationships being developed though the SIFI team are going to be invaluable going forward.

Massive thank you to magnificent SIFI trio David Clarke, Pete Townsend and Terry Quinn for organising as well as to the brilliant Dublin Business School team, Andrew Quinn, Andrew Conlan-Trant and Rory Mo-ran.

It was great to hear from so many new friends such as the inspiring Hesus Inoma and the amazing Susan Sweeney as well as Scotland’s leading fintech guru Daniel Broby of University of Strathclyde.

The trip to Ireland also gave the me the opportunity to meet up with Peter Oakes, the highly respected global fintech leader and founder of FinTech Ireland. Thanks Emma Shiel from SDI for arranging and joining us.

It was fantastic to hear first hand the story behind FinTech Ireland and the significant presence Peter has established in Europe and across the globe. Peter’s next trip was to help with the formation of FinTech Cyprus, another European partner for is to collaborate with.

It was poignant that we met Peter in the Hibernian Club and sat in the very chair that FinTech Scotland was conceived five years ago.

Looking forward to developing closer collaboration with Peter and the FinTech Ireland team as European partners.

My return from Dublin was via Hampshire (and Reading to see my mum) as I had the opportunity to meet up with Mark Hanson, Managing Director of Simply Health who provide valuable health insurance plans for millions of consumers.

The worlds of fintech, insurtech, healthtech all overlap, and we had a super conversation on some emerging innovations in this space and the potential to work in partnership with University of Edinburgh and entrepreneurs to explore further.

Collaborative partnership is also very much at the core in developing a Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence in Scotland and we are delighted the joint FinTech Scotland, University of Edinburgh, Scottish Enterprise and FDATA proposal has been shortlisted for funding.

A huge amount of credit for this must go to our very own European and Global Open Finance presidential’ leader, Gavin Littlejohn who is instrumental in the strategic development.

I’m looking forward to seeing Gavin next week when he returns from formidable open finance mission trip to Hong Kong, Australia and India.

The Open Finance initiative is facilitating further collaboration with partners and this is also true of the Ethical Finance Hub team based at Heriot Watt University

It was valuable to catch up with Chris Tait recently and talk through the fintech contribution to the Global Ethical Finance Forum which will take place in Edinburgh in October with many distinguished international partners.

Barry Wingate it would be super to work in partner with you on this following our chat a week or so ago!

International partnerships were the focus of the conversation with James Bernard of the Dubai DMMC, the enterprise agency, when we met in Edinburgh last week, thank you Russell Dalgleish for making the connection.

Encouraging a European and global innovation and growth mindset with the Scottish entrepreneurial community as a key focus of the conversation for the executive dinner of fintech organized by FWB Park Brown last Wednesday evening.

I very much valued the challenge and constructive feedback from the diverse group of successful business leaders from sectors outside of financial services and fintech and thank you to those who have reached out to follow up.

Big thanks to Graham Burns and Michael Dickson for expertly arranging and professionally hosting the engaging evening, I look forward to the next one, maybe in Aberdeen or even another European city?

Running Europe

Unfortunately, and to much frustration, my toe injury has not cleared up which means my running opportunities in Europe have been somewhat curtailed.

Whilst the buzz of the exciting fintech activity with so many fabulous people has kept me occupied, I am a bit of a bear with a sore head’ as I have not been able to get out and run.

I have tried swimming, but my limited breaststroke ability does not replace the three hour runs I so much enjoy!!

I know I will need to be patient in recovering but if I look angst when you see me you will know why!

Let’s hope I am going to be ready for the Stirling, Livingston and Lock Leven half marathons in the run up to Edinburgh marathon in May!! Until next time.

Utilising the Irish/Scottish finance corridor

Blog written by Terry Quinn at the Scottish Irish Finance Initiative

The Scottish Irish Finance Initiative seeks to serve the people of both Scotland and Ireland, the companies that already work in our communities and the wider global financial services industry, whom we hope to attract to our corridor.

In our first 18 months of operations we have already created the beginnings of a common financial industry between Scotland and Ireland, emphasising the benefits of treating both places as the bridge to overcome trading barriers and as a target for new investments. The only sure-fire way that we can maintain our world beating financial industries and see off the challenge from locations such as Berlin, Paris and financial hubs in Asia, is through greater cooperation, and we are delighted that we are garnering such interest in our initiative.

Ireland and Scotland have enough in common culturally, legally and politically to make cooperation worthwhile, and enough complementary skills so as to make cooperation beneficial to both parties. We have already seen fruitful progress in the fintech sector through meetings organised between Irish and Scottish companies, considering a wide range of innovative solutions in areas such as data quality and cleansing. Our project is also driving engagement in ensuring that both locations benefit from cooperation in areas such as asset management and servicing and the creation of a more unified labour market.

Our aim with this document is to gather together into one place the resources that any company might need to mitigate any Brexit challenges, and to guide them in using the Scottish Irish corridor in their future growth plans. Already the challenge of Brexit has spurred some companies into accelerating sales programmes and to look proactively at the international options available to them.

Our hope now is that trade between Scotland and Ireland will not only continue but expand and that a proactive, pragmatic and sensible approach to Brexit difficulties can actually open up opportunities.

One of the key targets as set to us by our Advisory Group is to bring together in one document all the information that anyone interested in the Scottish Irish finance corridor would need.

The result can be found here:

http://scottishirishfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/SIFI_brexit_utility.pdf

At present it’s focused on expediency in mitigating Brexit challenges but this is just the first iteration and we hope this will develop over time to become a fully fledged guide to all that our fabulous industries and companies have to offer the global finance sector and its clients and stakeholders.

Interview with Stephen Ingledew on why fintech matters

Our CEO Stephen Ingledew was interviewed by the Enterprise Pathway Programme team from Strathclyde university.

He gave his view on why fintech matters, the impact it can have on society and why it provides exciting new jobs for the future.

What is Fintech?

Fintech is the blend of new technologies, digital including data, with the world of financial services. Now that’s important because every one of us, in our personal and our working lives are impacted by the role of financial services. So Fintech is actually the opportunity to reinvent the way that those financial services are delivered through to all of us as individuals but also through to businesses as well

Why is it important to innovate in Fintech?

There’s real importance behind Fintech, the opportunity here to innovate. One is because of our needs as consumers are changing, in terms of our expectation, the need to access good quality products, the need to understand our money in a far better way.

And secondly the opportunity to innovate comes from the new technologies. Of course the digital world whether it’s the mobile phone, but the access to data, the use of artificial intelligence all provide new ways in which financial services can be delivered to us all.

What opportunities are there to innovate in fintech?

So there are a significant number of areas where there’s an opportunity to innovate. The key is to start off with the human need, and so think of yourself as individuals, think of the communities you live in, think of those around you and how actually, if they had better access to financial products a better understanding the way that financial world works, the better use of financial data, and how that could improve accessibility and all the other benefits that come from that. And then work back to think, well actually, the new technologies can actually improve that engagement, can improve that experience

So the key with fintech is not to start with the fin tech is that you start with the human being and work back from that and then think about how new technologies can be applied in the future.

The big opportunity here, that students have, is that you can come at it with a fresh pair of eyes, fresh thinking and more diverse thinking. So rather than think: “how do we actually in a small way slightly improve some of the financial products?”, actually, go back to the real need of why those products are in place, the way they’re delivered, whether it’s through a mobile phone or even through some other ways in a community.

So it’s that fresh thinking, diverse thinking, you don’t have to be a financial expert to be involved in fintech. In fact, sometimes, it’s an advantage not to be a financial expert.

What support is available for fintech businesses?

Fintech in Scotland is particularly exciting because there is a an environment that’s encouraging innovative new businesses such as Strathclyde University. Alongside that you’ve got an established financial services market, very big organisations, the big banks whether it’s RBS, HSBC. the international banks, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are all here in Scotland and they all want to innovate.

If you blend that together with the opportunity of bringing together new enterprises with established enterprises and that University sort of pedigree you’ve got a real blend of all the key ingredients to generate a new innovative environment.

What examples are there in terms of existing fintech businesses?

So let’s just take an example of an increasing number of people working in the gig economy. The gig economy is where your your working day your working week is up and down and therefore your pay is up and down and therefore how do you make sure the financial products relate to a much more variable way in which you earn money and want to earn money.

And when you work and when you don’t work rather than the traditional approach expecting you’re in a 9 to 5 job for 40 years. Those days have gone. Much more flexible working means much more flexible way in which people earn and their financial products need to relate to that.

What advice would you give to those considering a career in Fintech?

What I would really emphasise to the teams is the importance of focusing on the human need. The opportunity about meeting that need in a very different way, to deliver financial services in a better way. I wouldn’t focus really on the technicalities of how the products have worked in the past or how the taxes work or even how some of the technologies are being applied.

Don’t get into the nuts and bolts of blockchain and artificial intelligence. There’s enough out there really for that to be addressed at the right sort time. What’s important with fintech is actually the focus around the need and the different ways that need can be met with a different type of thinking, diverse thinking again going forward that allows us to really make a real shift in the way that financial services is provided through to individuals and to businesses.

Actually fintech provides a real significant opportunity. Yet clearly from an economic point of view the opportunity for economic growth in financial services, very crucial to the Scottish economy. But also in terms of employment the new jobs of the future. But alongside that is the economic with the social benefits as one of the social outcomes greater inclusion more diversity a richer way in which more communities are engaging in financial services rather than being left out or excluded. So this is an opportunity to combine those economic and social benefits alongside each other to the benefit of everybody.

Fortnightly FinTech Fuse ”“ Falling in Love with FinTech!

It is just so wonderful to see so many people falling in love with fintech and how it is fueling the opportunity to innovate through collaboration and inclusion.

This was very much the case on Wednesday morning when I joined the Lloyds Bank and Google teams for a Falling in Love with FinTech’ breakfast meet up.

The diverse audience from the fintech community, academia, large financial enterprises and many other organisations made a terrific atmosphere.

Big thanks to Misha Cunningham and Google Digital team for their fabulous hospitality

This meet up was brilliantly led by the inspiring Sarah Kenrick along with Tom, Kegode, Lisa Caldwell and Lloyds Bank team.

Lloyds, one of the initial founders of FinTech Scotland, are developing impressive innovations and collaborations by engaging the fintech community.

Community Love

The community love continued the next evening as we held FinTech Scotland Fusion’ gathering where we had a fantastic buzz and atmosphere. I know some carried it on into the very late hours!

The Fusion’ was expertly organized by our entrepreneurial friend Aleks Tomczyk with great collaboration and generosity from Kirsty Irvine and Johnston Carmichael.

Wonderful mini spotlight talks from Myles Stephenson of Modulr, Hannah Rudman of Wallet Services, Loral Quinn of Sustainably and Stuart Lunn of LendingCrowd as well as our fintech grandfather’ Gavin Littlejohn.

They all brought alive the evening by sharing their experiences and latest news and reaffirmed to a very diverse and engaged audience why falling in love with fintech was so easy.

We all decided that Fusion’ meet up will be a regular event in addition to our frequent fintech practitioner forums across Scotland so more on this to come

The community plays such an important role in welcoming new fintech enterprises working in Scotland and it was terrific to see firms new to the community with us on Thursday such as SageCity, Listings Ledger and Miconex.

The role of the community is something I shared with Stuart Harvey of Datatics and Graham Paterson a couple of weeks ago and we look forward to seeing them both at future events.

Supporting the growth of new fintech enterprises will see the community expand across Scotland and it is fantastic to be working with the Craig Wilson, Colin Carmichael of Sopra Steria and Gordon Donald and John Lonsdale of University of Edinburgh with a new accelerator programme.

Supporting the love of fintech innovation was very much in evidence when Mickael and I spent some time last week at Codebase with the Barclays Eagle Lab team.

Always wonderful to catch up with Trish McClay and talk about their terrific engagement along with the magical fintech entrepreneur Suhail Ahmad of AdviserDirect and the awesome Colin Hewitt of Float, who have now expanded into twenty plus nations.

We had been in Codebase the previous week for two fantastic sessions of massive significance in bringing more love into fintech, both of which will spread the fintech love far and wide.

Downstairs we had a FinTech consumer inclusion workshop with the Karen Rodger, Andrew McConnell from Scottish Government and along with Yvonne Macdermid, David Hilferty from Money Advice Scotland, Allison Barnes from Money Advice Service and other consumer groups.

The session was led by the inspiring duo Barbara Mills from CivTech and Nicola Anderson in developing a roadmap on how fintech can play a significant role in addressing financial inclusion challenges. This was all about the building new demand for fintech

Then, in parallel, upstairs, we had the Scottish Government session with entrepreneurs on how the engagement with small enterprises could be developed to improve the supply of innovation. This was a fantastic session led by Clare Mills, Carron McNab and colleagues.

It is a privilege to be part of this valuable work being led by Trish Quinn and hugely exciting to have the fintech community being involved in the opportunity to really impact big innovation with Government.

We shared these mutually aligned initiatives with the Digital Minister Kate Forbes and the FiSAB sub group with Graeme Jones the following day and it was great to get the endorsement to build on this big love’ opportunity for fintech.

Big Love

The broader love of fintech on a big scale is going to provide exciting opportunities to scale up the innovation in Scotland.

For example, in working with the rapidly changing M&G Prudential business engage with the fintech community and it was valuable to catch up with Mark Simpson and the Managing Director, David Macmillan a couple of times over this last fortnight

Then on Wednesday it was terrific to meet up with Sam Bedford, Gary McLellan and innovative team at CYBG in Glasgow.

Fantastic to see the leading edge examples from Jennifer and Jack of how they are innovating to improve customers financial engagement and the opportunities to engage with the fintech community in Scotland.

Really looking forward to progressing with the Sam and the team and combine our mutual love of fintech with real purpose.

The combination of big and small coming together to love fintech was one of the key themes for the discussion with Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce members on Thursday morning.

Thank you to everyone for the engagement and support, especially Liz Mcareavey and Rebecca Meish for inviting me to discuss how Scotland can develop the fintech love on a bigger scale.

This is something we were very much putting into action with senior executives Frank Tong and KC Tsui from HSBC Global who flew from Hong King to meet with us and firms from the fintech community.

Thank you to Ahmed El-Ryias from the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh for setting up the meeting, it was a terrific session late into the last Wednesday evening and onto the Thursday as well.

Thank you also to Colin Halpin who led HSBC to be one of Fintech Scotland initial founding partners and has played an important supporting role in our progress in the first year.

It was the fantastic presentations and engagement from the Scottish fintech firms which very much illustrated the innovative developments in Scotland and the significant opportunities to collaborate with the HSBC Global team.

In fact, Frank mentioned that the activities in Scotland were world leading and certainly made Scotland stand out as a global fintech centre, especially with date driven innovation.

Global Love

The global love continues to be an important part of work and this has been increasing even more over this last few weeks.

For example, absolutely I loved catching up with our good friend Thorsten Terweiden, who leads on fintech developments at Hong Kong Invest, on his visit to Scotland.

Great engagement with Thorsten and his team as we work with Graham Hatton and the SDI team in developing he Hong Kong Scotland bridge for our respective fintech communities.

This opportunity to share the mutual love of fintech opportunities was very much on the agenda when I met up on Tuesday with the fabulous Dan Roselli who is the founder of the impressive FinTech Accelerator Hub in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Dan took time out of his vacation to share the amazing story of what the team has achieved and there were so many parallels with the what we are building in Scotland.

I thanked Dan with one of the great Scottish beers and we agreed to take forward a joint number of areas to develop the mutual love of fintech both sides of the Atlantic.

The collaboration opportunities with USA was also the focus of my conversation with Jennifer Ericson, a Global Scot based in Minnesota and I very much value the connections Jennifer is helping us build for our fintech community.

Exporting is an important part of the fintech agenda, and it was valuable to catch up Suzanne Henderson from the Scottish Government team who is leading on the work to identify global market priorities for all sectors.

Very much looking forward to progress this work with Suzanne, Lesley Ward, Scott Strain along with Lorraine Mallon from SDI and build on the progress being made by a number of firms.

A great example of this is hearing last week about The ID Co, who are part of the DIT fintech trade mission to New York in a couple of weeks and Craig Buchan, the founder of QPal, who are progressing amazing innovations in the Middle east and Africa.

Last Monday, I was delighted to be invited by Graeme Jones of SFE to join him and SFE members for the dinner with the City of London Mayor Peter Estlin for an engaging conversation on the global role for Scotland in financial services and fintech.

I had met with Peter Estlin the previous week at the latest Department of International Trade Fintech Board meeting which considered a number of areas in developing the international reach of fintech.

In particular, it was great to hear from the very engaging Laura Royle from the FCA who outlined the valuable work in developing the Global Financial Innovation Network.

Laura recently led a fantastic FCA Project Innovate event for the Scottish fintech community and we are looking to do this again to cover some of the global regulation opportunities for fintech firms.

Collaborative Love

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to share this global opportunity for fintech at the City Deal Conference and the importance of collaboration to deliver data driven innovation success for the country.

I very much enjoyed the chance to share the stage with Digital Minister Kate Forbes as well as Professor Mark Parsons and Professor Charlie Jeffrey along with the distinguished panels.

To highlight the importance of collaborative love I was given the challenge by Andy Nichol form Edinburgh City Council to finish with the words from a song by The Men They Couldn’t Hang!!

This I duly did with the very apt words from their song Great Expectations’!

Huge thanks to Hamish Miller, Will Peakin and the Future Scot team for putting on such an important collaboration conference. Looking forward to the next one in Glasgow in May.

I’m also looking forward to speaking at the FinTech North events in April and May and always valuable to catch up with Julian Wells on Monday to talk through sharing the fintech collaboration love both sides of the border.

There are some great expectations from the data driven innovation programme and with the momentum growing now behind building the Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence then Scotland’s fintech enterprises will play a central role.

It was hugely exciting to be part of the collaboration bringing alive the Centre of Excellence working with various partners including Damien at University of Edinburgh and Gavin with his FDATA team.

You’ll hear more on that in the coming weeks although if you were with us on Thursday night at Fusion then Gavin gave you some of the exciting snippets of news!

Another wonderful collaborative initiative for Scotland is the forthcoming launch of The European FinTech Digital Satellite Office in Edinburgh next month

This is a first for Scotland and for Europe and it is brilliant to be collaborating with our friends in the EU to make this significant investment happen with the University of Edinburgh and Scottish Enterprise.

This Digital Office will invest in academic research in fintech as well as new start up fintech enterprises. Watch this space for more.

The collaboration with Scotland’s world leading universities is a hugely important and it was a real pleasure to be invited to speak to Heriot Watt students on career opportunities in fintech by the inspiring David Steinberg.

The talent from all disciplines is becoming an even stronger pull with international fintech enterprises, Datafest is a fantastic two weeks of sharing this with the world.

Terrific to work with MBN Solutions and Deloitte with excellent fringe meet up events as part of DataFest.

I shared this and the wider talent and diversity attraction of Scotland with long standing innovator and friend Nish Kotak of Talecco on his recent visit to Edinburgh.

Very much looking forward to working with Nish to encourage some large enterprises to come to Scotland.

The week finished off with the quarterly FinTech Scotland board meeting expertly chaired and hosted by David Fergusson at the impressive Nucleus Financial offices.

A very valuable and constructive conversation on the longer term future strategy for FinTech Scotland as we look to the next stage of our journey.

It was great to have Digital Minister Kate Forbes join us for the discussion and I am looking forward to progressing over the coming months.

Running Love

My running love has been hugely strained over this last two weeks as illness and unusual toe injury have meant I have not run for a fortnight!

Going from running 55+ miles a week to none is really tough in so many ways although the intensity of the fintech engagement and presentations has taken my mind of this a little bit.

However, it has even more reinforced my passion and love for running and I hope to be back on the road and the Spring races in the next week.

With trips to the EU in Brussels and Dublin to build Scotland fintech collaboration over the next two weeks I am hoping to take my love of running and fintech to Europe! Until next time.