Celebrating Fintech Insider's 150th Episode - After Dark II: a Halloween special!

This week’s news show marks Fintech Insider’s 150th episode – and what an episode!

Recorded live at our offices in London’s WeWork Aldgate, episode 150 was Fintech Insider: After Dark 2 – a news show with a difference.

Episode 150

Following in the footsteps of After Dark I in September, episode 150 was After Dark II, a Fintech Insider news show in front of a live audience of over 200 people, covering all the week’s most interesting and/or fun stories with added audience participation, games and a reprise of the Fintech Wall of Emoji. Listen to the full episode here. Check out some of the highlights in this show reel: [video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="http://11fs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/After-Dark-Teaser-1.mp4"][/video] David, Jason and Simon were joined by some of our favourite guests from previous podcasts: Valentina Kristensen, Head of PR and Marketing at OakNorth, Capco’s Principal Consultant, Charlie Wood and the legendary journalist, Monty Munford and to help us curate the Emoji Wall we had none other than the founder of Emojipedia himself, Jeremy Burge. This time the show also had a Halloween theme, there was fancy dress, free Halloween Fintech Insider t shirts (modelled beautifully by the hosts and guests in the photo above) and scary amounts of fintech banter. There was also much more impressive Halloween fancy dress & face paints in the audience - as @TheScribbleBug said on Twitter - only at one of our events would someone come dressed as a Monzo card!

Also: there is a girl here dressed as a @monzo card. Only at the @FinTechInsiders Halloween party could this be an actual thing 😂👻

— Harriet... (@TheScribbleBug) 2 November 2017

Software developer & fangurrrrl 👍✨ pic.twitter.com/ecN1p1ylZq

— Harriet... (@TheScribbleBug) 2 November 2017

Ice breaker

To kick things off the panel discussed Monzo’s reputation as a chat up line or conversation starter in London’s bars whenever the hot coral of Monzo’s cards are shown. We asked our audience if this is true: is hot coral an ice breaker? And if so, are any other challenger bank cards get the same reaction? We asked our audience to hold up their challenger bank cards - amazingly over 75% of the audience had one - even those who work in traditional banks! In our audience many challenger banks were represented but the hot coral definitely stood out in a sea of monotone bank cards - they definitely stand out and could easily be a talking point, if only as a sign of inclusion, similar to supporting the same football team - not a guarantee of a date! [caption id="attachment_64317" align="alignleft" width="840"] Bank cards in the air - hot coral stands out from the crowd[/caption] And what’s in a name? As trademarks soar in the UK in the last year, fintech is said to be behind the huge rise in new trademarked names as more and more start ups are created in the sector. Trademarks registered by finance firms rise by 35% in 5 years to 4,228 and we asked Jason Bates, namer of both Mondo/Monzo and Starling shares his thoughts on some of the more obtuse names to be trademarks in the last year including Zentity, Bondora and Numus Cash. Following The Verge’s US Tech Survey results, which revealed that Americans trust Amazon almost as much as their bank, and Google only slightly less. We reran the survey with our London-based audience with… differing results. People trust their banks more than we first thought!

Trick or Treat?

As it’s a Halloween themed show, we also played a Trick or Treat game with our audience, themed around celebrity crypto endorsements. Simon listed celebrities who may or may not have endorsed a crypto asset and our audience had to shout “Treat” if he had and “Trick” if they hadn’t. There were a few red herrings along the way and some of the audience were “tricked”! Play along at home, answers at the bottom of this post:

1. 1. Rapper - Ghostface Killah of the Wu tang Clan
   2. U2 frontman - Bono
   3. Former West Ham and Tottenham football manager Harry Redknapp
   4. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
   5. Actor and Singer Jamie Foxx
   6. DH - DJ Khaled
   7. Heiress and tabloid news fodder of the early 00s - Paris Hilton
   8. Rapper, investor and entrepreneur Puff Daddy/P Diddy/ Sean Combs
   9. Boxer Floyd “Money” Mayweather

The Fintech Wall of Halloween Emoji

The Fintech Wall of Emoji also had a Halloween makeover, twinning each of the original emojis with a Halloween counterpart. Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia helped us curate the wall, attributing the correct meaning to each one; apparently it’s “Thinking Face” not “Thinky face” - who knew?! [caption id="attachment_64322" align="alignnone" width="5616"] Jeremy Burge educating us on the real names of our emojis[/caption] This time our audience had to help us decide where on the emoji wall each of the following popular phrases and products sit, on a sliding scale from Raised Hands - Thinking Face - Unimpressed - Nauseated, including:

• Jamie Dimon vs bitcoin
• "Robots will replace your staff"
• P2P payments
• Celebrity crypto endorsements
• Challenger bank outages
• iPhone X
• Pixel 2
• "Being the Uber of..."

Check out the results below! [caption id="attachment_64318" align="alignnone" width="8096"] The curated Fintech Wall of Emoji[/caption]

Topical stories

Other stories we covered included Uber’s new credit target overtly targeted at millennials, with all the perks it included, and 68% of SMBs view their banks as utility providers and very few of them view them as a business partner or have a particularly strong relationship with them. This is a real missing link in traditional bank’s output and SMBs continue to be underserved by traditional banks. They also discuss how in Israel women leading top banks is the norm rather than the exception as per the UK, with 3 out of the top 6 of Israel’s leading banks are headed up by women. Valentina led the discussion on this one, shamefully reminding us that while Israel are leading the way on gender equality in banking, there are more men named John leading FTSE 100 companies in the UK than there are women.

And finally...

We concluded the show on a top 11 list (obviously we’re fans of any 11 lists!) of Amazon’s Alexa’s “best” jokes - “best” is very much in inverted commas considering the strength of the jokes included! For example: "Alexa, I've got 99 problems." ”But a glitch ain’t one” Thanks to all our guests for being a part of the show - and to everyone who came along to watch, we really hope you enjoyed it. It's always great to meet some of our listeners in person and get your feedback on the show. If you missed it, we hope you enjoy listening back and we hope to see you at the next one! Thanks to WeWork for helping us put on the show, and the entire 11Media team to make it happen. Here's to the next 150 episodes of Fintech Insider! To find out more listen to the podcast in full, listen back to After Dark I or subscribe to Fintech Insider so you never miss an episode! To find out more about the people behind the podcast visit our 11:FS About page. To find out more about the stories we covered in the show and to add your thoughts on them, visit FintechInsiderNews.com

Trick or Treat - Celebrity Crypto Endorsement, Answers

• Rapper - Ghostface Killah of the Wu tang Clan (Treat - Ghostface Killah co-founded a cryptocurrency venture called Cream Capital, who hope to raise $30Million in ICO)

• U2 frontman and tax avoider - Bono (Trick)

• Former West Ham and Tottenham football manager Harry Redknapp (Treat and trick - Redknapp has now deleted his endorsement)

• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Trick- although voted on Blockchain Insider as the celebrity we’d most trust to endorse an ICO, The Rock has not yet done so)

• Actor and Singer Jamie Foxx (Treat - Back in September Jamie Foxx promoted the token sale for Cobinhood, the zero fee trading exchange - via Twitter)

• DH - DJ Khaled (Treat - DJ Khaled promoted an Ethereum ICO via his Instagram in September, promoting Centra Tech and CTR tokens)

• Heiress and tabloid news fodder of the early 00s - Paris Hilton (Treat - Paris endorsed Lydiancoin in early September, before seemingly withdrawing her support and deleting her tweets after the CEO of the parent company was caught up in domestic violence legal charges )

• Rapper, investor and entrepreneur Puff Daddy/P Diddy/ Sean Combs (Trick)

• Boxer Floyd “Money” Mayweather (Treat - Mayweather has supported several ICOs since July this year including Hubii Network and Stox, voicing his support via Instagram)