253. News: Bucking the trend of Brexit

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253. News: Bucking the trend of Brexit

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On this week's episode, Sarah and David sit down with Dr. Louise Beaumont, Daniel Hegarty, and Adam Dodds to discuss the greatest and latest stories in fintech.

Our hosts, Sarah Kocianski and David M. Brear sit down with three great guests: Dr. Louise Beaumont, Independent, working with players across the industry to ensure disruption, Daniel Hegarty, CEO of Habito, and Adam Dodds, CEO of Freetrade to talk all about the latest news in fintech. Including:

British airways breach and banks’ reactions. The airline said personal and financial details of customers making or changing bookings on two specific dates had been compromised. About 380,000 transactions were affected, but the stolen data did not include travel or passport details. BA said all customers affected by the breach had been contacted on Thursday night. The breach only affects people who bought tickets during the timeframe provided by BA, and not on other occasions.

Wells Fargo get investigated by US Dept of Justice. The Justice Department is investigating possible fraud committed at the company’s wholesale banking unit. Quoting unnamed “people familiar with the matter,” the probe follows “revelations that employees improperly altered customer information” – including adding information such as Social Security numbers to documents without those people’s consent.

UK fintech valuations flying high. Fintech and finance seemingly unaffected by Brexit as funding and valuations continue to rise, according to the FC. Funding Circle, the peer-to-peer lender, unveiled plans to raise £300m in an initial public offering in October that is expected to value it at more than £1.5bn. British bank OakNorth valued at £1.8 billion in £76m funding round.

TransferWise reports a profit for the second year in a row as revenue doubles. Fintech start-up TransferWise reports second year of profit, and with an annual post-tax net profit of £6.2 million for the fiscal year ending March 2018. The firm says that £3 billion worth of transactions is moved around each month by its more than 4 million users. It plans to roll out its traveler-friendly borderless account product to U.S. users later this year.

UK's Tech Nation picks 20 fintech programme members. Tech Nation has picked 20 early-stage startups to join its new fintech programme, promising to give them intensive backing to help grow their businesses and the country's financial technology ecosystem. The new programme will see participants get the chance to work with and learn from some of the UK's top fintech entrepreneurs. The 20 firms picked to join the first cohort work in areas such as payments, financial inclusion, regtech, AI, SME financing, Open Banking, and cryptocurrencies.

Habito’s life insurance. Underwritten by AIG life, the service aims to offer cover in as few as nine questions, and without the need for any medical data, by using information already given to the provider during the mortgage application process. Daniel Hegarty is on hand to give us more info.

The biggest winners in the South-east Asian e-payment market. e-payment players such as ride sharing apps Grab and Go-Jek will be the biggest winners in the South-east Asian e-payment market, going by a latest Morgan Stanley report. Banks will lose between US$13.1 billion and US$15.5 billion in value to non-bank operators by 2022, Telcos will also benefit, taking around US$2 billion to US$2.9 billion according to the report.

Fintech changing Africa’s GDP. The contribution of fintech to Sub Saharan Africa’s economic output will increase by at least $40 billion to $150 billion by 2022, according to Financial Sector Deepening Africa, which is a development-finance organisation funded by the UK. Sub Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product is about $1.6 trillion, according to IMF. Most of that money is coming out of mobile-phone companies.

Agatha Answers, an AI search & answer engine. Forethought’s Agatha Answers which is an AI engine designed to help customer service staff more efficiently and accurately answer customer questions. It’s an AI search & answer engine that indexes knowledge within an organization and pro-actively delivers it to employees in context. It provides answers but leaves the human agent to go with what answer they think best fits the question and situation.

And finally, we take a look at what happened when John McAfee told his Twitter followers to harass the SEC.

All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!

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For any startups that are looking for Seed and Series A funding and think Nationwide would be a good strategic investor, you can get in touch with them via @NBSVentures on Twitter or email hello@nbsventures.co.uk

This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins. Edited by Michael Bailey.

Special Guests: Adam Dodds, Daniel Hegarty, and Dr. Louise Beaumont.

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