← Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. This is FinTech Insider News this week Internet chaos eases as AWS bounces back from day long outage splitwise supercharges payments in Europe with Tink's pay by bank expansion and Revolut finally lands a banking license. But not what you think. We'll be discussing all of this and more on today's news show, so don't go anywhere. Hello and welcome to episode 1009. Gosh, it's such a huge number of FinTech Insider brought to you by 11fs, the five time consultancy of the year that works with banks, investment firms, digital banks and fintechs to be build the next generation of financial services. I'm David Barton Grimley, director of strategy and head of product here at 11Fs and this week I have somehow managed to do two speaking events on the same day and also somehow do tons of client work. It's been a lot actually. I was at the Open Banking Expo in London. We're going to be talking about open banking on this episode, so lots to talk about there. And I did a great debate at night, which is the very first time I've actually debated quite spicy fintech topics on the stage with a bunch of extremely incredible people. So that was a lot of fun with Fintech fringe. So go and check that out as well. So onto the news. This week, AWS outages caused chaos across a whole range of markets from smart doorbells to banks, wonky alarms and even ruined Starbucks orders. Later in the podcast we'll dive into what really happened when the cloud went down. But here on FinTech Insider we're still running at full capacity, much to your relief. And three people who were completely unaffected by the outages and definitely, definitely running on all cylinders are our panelists. So let's meet them. And first up, it's a very warm fintech Insider welcome back for Ian Morin, Head of payments at Tink. Welcome back to the show, Ian. Great to have you back. We'll be hearing more about what Tink have been up to. But Ian, tell us a little bit about yourself.
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B
Yeah, hi there. Thanks for having me back. I was also at Open Banking Expo this week, I think many, many people were and also got the opportunity to have a reasonably interesting, pretty interesting conversation with a couple of people from Chip and from JP Morgan at the same time. So that was really interesting around where we're all going, what we're doing, how we're finally going to, how we're going to keep the sort of growth of open banking payments on the Trajectory that it is. That was super exciting. Lots going on. I lead the payments business for Tink across Europe, so anyone who's not a bank effectively is my customer in the Tink payments ecosystem. But good to see you all. Good to be back.
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A
Amazing. And yeah, we've got one of those customers coming up on the show to talk about. And next up, we have a fintech debut for Maruusha Naidu, Global Head of partnerships at Paymentology. So, Maruxa, welcome to the show. Tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and your role at Paymentology.
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C
Thanks so much for having me, David. And I have to say I'm so excited that this is my debut. Thank you for having me. So, like you said, Mary Schneider, global Head of partnerships at Pavementology. Who is Pavementology? We are a global issuer pro. We operate across uk, Europe, Middle East, Africa, LAC and apac. My role specifically is to curate the strategy for our external partners and really hone in on when to build, when to buy, when to work with phenomenal partners who really make our ecosystem strong and powerful and the best globally. And actually, we launched something really exciting this year, which was our very own Issuer Academy podcast and I'm the host. So maybe we can have you on sometime. David.
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A
Yeah, would love that. That's awesome. Yeah, amazing. Welcome to podcasting.
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C
Thank you. It's harder than it looks, but it's a lot of fun. So I'm so glad to be on the other side of the table today. Yeah, super excited to be here and great to be with Ian and Pablo as well. So thanks.
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A
Awesome. And last but not least, it's a fintech insider return for Pablo Vergara, co CEO at Belvo. Great to have you with us again. Pablo, what have you been up to over at Belvo since we last spoke? I know you've also recently released a direct debit. Report us a little bit about that.
- [04:34]
D
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, David, and pleasure to be back. I think it's, it's definitely been, I think, more than a couple of years since I was last on, on, on the show. I know you've had my co founder not too long ago, but it's, it's great to be here. I'm great to talk about all things open banking, open finance. So at Belvo, you know, we're the leading open finance player in Latin America. We currently operate in Mexico and Brazil and you can think of us as, you know, the open finance partner for, you know, leading banks and financial innovators in the region. So we work from, you Know, with the likes of, you know, all the large banks, so the BBVAs, the, you know, Bradescos of the region. But we also work with, you know, the large neobanks with, you know, with nubank, with, you know, with Revolut, with Mercado Paolo and the like, you know, found the company in 2019. So we've already been been at it for, for almost seven years now. And yeah, as you mentioned, we recently published a direct debit report. You know, obviously part of what we do, given our open finance remit is is data. Part of it is, is, is payments. We've been growing a lot on the payment side of, of things and in Mexico, you know, one of the, you know, payments products we deliver is direct debit. Right. So we orchestrate direct debit via our own propriet and we actually released a really cool report that talks about the growth of direct debit in Mexico and generally the growth of account to account payment methods. So yeah, it's been a great run.
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A
Yeah, that's amazing. I mean it's definitely growing all over the world. So yeah, keen to give that one a, keen to give that one a read. All right, now that's our panel. Let's go into the news and this one's from Fintech magazine. And as promised, AWS outage a major risk for the financial sector. I mean, I would say maybe yes. An outage at Amazon Web Services affected millions globally, disrupting services from major financial institutions like Lloyds, Barclays and HMRC in the UK, as well as platforms globally such as Zoom, Slack and Fortnite. So it affected so many different organizations. The incident originated at AWS's North Virginia data centers, impacting critical services like DynamoDB and EC2, which are essential for payment process processing and core banking applications just about everywhere. This outage adds to a history of AWS disruptions, including significant incidences in 2012, 2021 and 2024, highlighting the persistent risks associated with reliance on just a few major cloud providers. Experts emphasize the need for financial institutions to develop robust resilience strategies, including backup systems and alternative data routes to mitigate the risks of such outages. I mean, I find this absolutely in some ways inevitable. I mean there is going to be outage in downtime, but also terrifying as we become more and more reliant on cloud providers. Was anyone affected by this? Anyone's businesses or kind of know anybody who was. What do you all think about this opening it up?
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B
Terror silence, I was going to say is that I know it's like I Think, well, we weren't, I mean, we weren't impacted by it. You obviously see it, it's very public when it happens because, you know, the impact that it has sort of spreads across everyone. But I think it just underlines the importance of building out resilience in the way that we're operating across the industry and making sure that we've got everything in place that we can to keep things operating. But. And it's very public when it does go wrong.
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C
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Ian. You know, when we look at it, luckily we were not affected. Right. But it's such a balancing act because the reality is is there are always going to be outages. It's how you really mitigate and balance out those risks. Because being cloud first, you know, at Paymentology we are definitely cloud first. It's a huge part of our global strategy in order to obviously, you know, scale with fast, with customers, faster, be more resilient, have better security. But at the same time it's also about making sure that, you know, we don't have a concentration risk. So what we do is we create resilience by having a multi cloud provider structure and so we're able to fail over quite quickly if there is an incident. Because the reality is, and we're all in payments, there will always be an incident that is inevitable. It's really about how quickly we adapt and, you know, react and it's really about proactively, you know, making sure that you are designed for architecture failures. Right. What I, what I will say, and actually this came from our CTO is the most important thing is to, you know, make sure, like we said, be proactive about how you actually build, avoid cloud lock ins, which is, you know, what we've done at Paymentology. But I will give it to aws, they responded really quickly. Their communication to customers was clear, concise and you know, I think the people who were affected knew that they were behind it and I think that also shows that the taking it seriously, having regional instances of cloud hubs is also very important for mitigating risk. But thankfully we were not affected. But it did show that AWS are, you know, they're planning for how they react.
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A
That's such a good point.
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B
I think consumers are getting more used to it to a certain, I mean that's not saying that we should all accept it. I think it is clearly super important that we build for resilience. But it wasn't so long ago when there was a similar outage and Meta went down with Meta and everyone thought the Internet was broken, and it wasn't. It was that meta had gone down. I think those kind of instances, the public is becoming more aware of it as well. There is a responsibility on us all to build in that resilience and work with our technology providers, regulators and everything, really, to make sure that we've got the most resilience we can. But there's also, I think, a little bit more recognition from consumers generally that very rarely something might go wrong and that it's important that you protect them at the end of the day and that there's no permanent sort of impact on that consumer.
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D
Yeah. And just building on Ian's point there, I think it's also relevant not because end users or customers might have gotten used to it, but I think it also shows how important it is from, you know, customer communications perspective. Because you see, like, brands responding in very different ways to these outages. Right. So you see brands not saying anything at all and just being like, well, look, it's just one of many that have happened, that happened and that will happen. And you see other brands that are, you know, just like front and center being like, hey, this is what's happening. This is how it's affecting us. This is what we're doing about it, and this is how we're thinking about the future. Right. So I think it's also important there. And it also reinforces, you know, kind of that trust also, especially in critical industries like financial services, where, hey, like, a payment can not go through, but it's like it can, it can be very, very, very disruptive if a payment doesn't go through. Right. It's not, you know, you paying for your Starbucks latte. Right. It can be something much larger, you know, much more critical than that. So I think just the way brands also respond in these situations is really important, and it sets folks apart. Right? So if you're banking with two institutions and one of them sends you a push notification right away and says, hey, this is going on, they're going to build more trust than the other brand that you bank with, and they don't tell you anything.
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A
So interesting, this debate, because it's almost as if we may have to get used to more outages anyway. I mean, if you just think about the more digitization, the more people are putting things on the cloud, the more likelihood that there is for failure. And so accepting that and having those communication strategies in places is very important. There's also a stat here as well, which is just kind of staggering that I Want to read out, which is that despite the disruption, Amazon shares rose 1.6%. So what the hell does that mean? I mean, does that mean that to what all of you are saying, that actually people are just being like, well, it happens. And actually they responded incredibly well, as you're saying Maruxia, or is it that there is something very dystopian going on here in that data center? Growth is just growing exponentially. When you think about GPUs and all of the AI type stuff, that for me is almost just crazy, what's going on there.
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B
It is an interesting outcome. I, I don't claim to have insight into how their share price grow, grew, but yeah, I mean, it is really interesting, but I think that, you know, they, they did, to Pablo's point, you know, they, they had. And basically, actually they did handle it well. They communicated. They owned it. You know, there was not a, there wasn't the, let's try and blame it. Somebody else for it. They owned it straight away.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And they were super clear about it. And I think, you know, that's the trust bit.
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C
Yeah. And I'll add to that. You know, it's always about people don't remember how long the outage lasted. It was about how it was managed. And I think, you know, chatting to our CTO this morning, he was kind of like, it actually promoted confidence in him that if there is ever a problem, AWS is gonna be there front and center next to us, you know, supporting us through any challenges. And so that obviously shows that the trust in the communication and the brand carries, you know, so much further than just one out. It's about a long term partnership, it's about a long term strategy. It's about saying, look, yes, there will be issues, there will be incidents, but at the end of the day, the pros definitely outweigh the risks. Especially if you have a partner who's willing to, like Ian said, own it and take accountability.
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A
Yeah, right. And the truth is, you know, we live in a much more real time world. You know, if you rewind the clock back, I don't know, 20 years, people were very used to the idea that, you know, you're. I mean, I remember banking apps would, would shut down in some ways, right? So you would go online and you would just be, you know, open. Like online banking would just be down and that's what people were used to. So if we're used to much more real time, then maybe we should all just get used to a little bit more downtime and how some of those companies respond to that. I just wanted to play all of you a little clip because we actually did a very interesting episode on outages on the very. On this very topic back in May of this year. And I sat down with Matt Pfeiffer, who's the group CTO at Bonzo Bank. Really inspirational Gu. And he was talking us through how they view outages and some of their approaches to resilience. So here's the clip. So let's talk about Monzo Stand in, mate. What is it?
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E
So let's talk about the primary platform. So this is the platform that, you know, serves the majority of traffic 24. 7. Think of this as several thousand individually simple, loosely connected components working together to service customers. Those things run in data centers, usually multiple locations. And so lots of moving parts. And occasionally things go wrong. For example, server hard drives will intermittently fail, right? Power outages will happen. Some part of the network is going to have intermittent fluctuations and failures, which will cause some badness in the system. You don't need Monzo stand in for that. The system is distributed, it's resilient. And typically when individual components have issues the rest of the system is resilient to, those failures will step in and continue to service the customer. So the customer won't even notice that a drive in a server has just been replaced, for example. That's what the primary platform does. So then you have to think about, well, how does this go drastically wrong and at a high level, there's probably two potential root causes, and they're both obviously extremely unlikely, but they are plausible. So you want to protect against that if you want to have a high level of resilience. One is that your cloud provider has a serious technical issue that's affecting multiple data centers in multiple locations, as an example. The second likely root cause is if we make a change in the system that causes all sorts of error conditions which are difficult to roll back. For example, like hypothetical examples of how things could go very wrong with your normal good operational resilience isn't enough. So we thought, well, how could we fix that? And the team went away and came back with the idea for Monzo Stand in, which is basically, well, let's take both of those things out of the equation.
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A
All right, so we will leave a link to that episode in the show Notes for all of you to listen to. It was a great conversation. So please do deep dive and go in and onto our next story. And this one is from fintech Finance News Splitwise expands paybibank Across France, Germany and Austria with Tink. Splitwise and Tink, which is a Visa owned open banking platform, are expanding their partnership to introduce Paybuybank in in France, Germany and Austria. In the UK, Splitwise has already seen 150% increase in Tink powered account checks and payment initiations this year, showing strong early traction. Previously, users needed to leave the Splitwise app and manually initiate bank transfers to settle the balances. Boy do I know that, by the way. Boy do I know that. We'll talk about that in a minute. The new integration lets them link their bank account and pay directly in app. With fewer steps, this rollout aligns with broader growth in open banking. Global users are expected to grow from 183 million in 2025 to over 645 million by 2029. So obviously, Ian, we're going to come to you first on this and yeah, I mean, you know, as a historic user of Splitwise, that has always been a big like, why can't this just do it in the app? And now you guys are helping them do that. So, yeah, give us more detail.
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B
Yeah, I remember when we first started talking to them and every now and again you get customers come along where the whole office goes, I want us to solve this problem. I love the app, don't like this bit of it. We all use it. Please, let's help solve this problem. So I think there was a lot of investment from our team as well to work with them to make sure that this worked super well. We launched in the uk, as you alluded to there, we've done some pretty interesting. We don't do much above the line. You don't see a lot of above the line type advertising and campaigns, but I don't know if anybody saw it, but over last summer we had a series of physical displays and video walls in the airports and stuff around Splitwise and it was a be wise use splitwise, so it was a play on that and there'd be a scenario and then a be wise use splitwise, which worked very well. And we saw, actually it's one of those, you see the campaign and you saw the growth come as everybody's going on holiday and then setting that, that great, great business to work with. They're super keen to push out. As I say, it's gone well in the uk, so launching out across Europe, hoping, expecting it to grow in similar ways. If you look at the user base across Europe, it's significant. So expecting good things from it.
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A
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, are There any specific behavioral changes that you've seen? Or is it literally just adoption and use? I can imagine, as you said.
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B
Yeah, I think, I mean, for those that don't know what it is, it's an.
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A
We should define that.
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B
Yeah, sorry, go on, Ian. Yeah, so it's an expense sharing app. It's dead simp. You just add your expenses as you go. Some people use it if they flat share. I know some couples that use it and then it's often used by friends when they go on holiday to split their expenses and settle up at the end. And now it's dead easy. You just hit pay and it sends the money where it needs to go. So that's pretty cool. I think the trigger points, you need to do an account check to onboard. So to validate if I want to get paid, if I want to get money into my account, I need to validate, it's my account. So that's often the first step that you see into that onboarding. So what we saw when we did that campaign back in the summer was that as soon as that went live, we saw the number of account checks on our dashboards. Just went straight up vertical. You could see from day one, it was really interesting. As soon as it went live, you could see the trigger and the graph. So that was the first indicator that people were picking it up. And then we watched the payment track grow after that.
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A
Very cool. Pablo, I'd love to bring you into the conversation to get your, I guess, your broader perspective on open banking growth in Mexico and more broadly. What are you seeing? The emerging use case? Are you seeing stuff like this taking off?
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D
Yeah, I mean, the countries where we operate, so Mexico, Brazil, I would say, are definitely at the forefront of open banking. More broadly, open finance in the region, there's definitely many differences with what you see or what you interact with on a daily basis in the uk, in Europe, or even in the US I think what we've seen, we've been operating for the past six years. The first four years, I would say. Most of the use cases that we saw working either with financial institutions or fintechs or even large tech businesses was mostly focused around data, you know, and in data, mostly focused on credit and lending. So how can you underwrite better with, you know, open finance data?
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A
Right.
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D
Either coming from banks or coming from a myriad of other data sources, which I think that's one of the specificities of latam, which is, you know, there's such a large unbanked or underbanked population that oftentimes the role that we play as the kind of, you know, the all in one regional open finance platform is that we do all the, you know, the dirty work of like putting all the sources of data together, making sense of them and then just serving them onto a platform. So that if you're a bank and you want to validate income, it doesn't matter where it's coming from, it doesn't matter if it's coming from a bank, doesn't matter if it's coming from, you know, the tax authority, doesn't matter where it's coming from, but you get a verified income from, from your end user. So we saw a lot of that. We still see that in great measure. But for sure, Payments has taken off in the past two, three years initially what caught on and this is not necessarily open finance related, so account to account Payments has had a very big penetration since it launched in Mexico and in Brazil. Brazil, you're probably familiar and the audience is probably familiar with Pixel kind of global standard in how peer to peer payments has to be done and launched and scaled. But as of late, we've been seeing a lot more of not only one time payments, but more recurring payments, variable recurring payments. And that's kind of where the beauty of open finance comes in. And a lot of the stuff we've been building as well is on these recurring payments use cases where, hey, you just connect the bank account and you know, you let the magic happen. Right? Because you know, you have a lot of people in Mexico, Brazil, paying bills, repaying credit cards, the same as you have in the uk, in the US or in Europe. Right. So over the past couple of years we've been seeing a lot of growth in, you know, open finance powered recurring bank payments.
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A
Yeah, it just makes sense, right? Just take so much friction out of it. It's so interesting, Pablo, with all of those use cases. Marisha, I'd love to bring you into the conversation. What's your views on the two kind of sit side by side?
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C
Yeah, this is such an exciting conversation because the reality is we are such firm supporters of account to account, whether it is pulling into a wallet or a mobile wallet or another bank account, or whether it's P2P payments like Splitwise and what Tinker doing, or whether it's cross border kind of remittance. I think it plays a fundamental part in the customer experience because the reality is when you look at banking, it's not just about supporting one kind of use case, it's about really looking at the customer and understanding all of the different needs that that customer has. And I think when you look at account to account payments as well as card, the complementary, it's two sides of the same coin. It's just innovation in different areas and it's really providing optionality for customers where they can say actually I'm traveling, I'm going to need my card because I'm going to Mexico, which is still quite a cash heavy market and I'm going to need cash while still being able to say okay, but at the same time when I'm in Mexico, I can transfer funds to my friends that I'm traveling with so that we can split the expenses. So it's really complimentary and it's really about saying what are we trying to solve? What are the pain points that our customers have that we need to bring together different types of innovation and payment instruments to really answer that how do we help them live better each day?
- [26:43]
A
Yeah, it's such a good point because I think from a UK or a Europe perspective, one of the things we've seen, we've done a lot of work into this area, a lot of research, is that there are absolutely payment types that just totally make sense for open banking, but there are absolute payment types that just still totally make sense for cards, small purchases, retail, all of that kind of stuff. And so having the two exist side by side I think is very important. Ian, I'd love to come to you for a final word on this. Just picking maybe up on my point about Europe. What are the kind of things that you are thinking about next to improve adoption in Europe?
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B
Yeah, yeah, I think that there are, I mean you touched it. There are some use cases and this is one of the topics actually on the panel Chatting with Chip Open Banking Expo. If you have an account funding flow or a top up flow and you're not using a pay by bank component to that, you're probably behind the curve today. So it's sort of where else does that fit in? Pablo touched on recurring payments actually. So we see sweeping variable recurring payments in the uk. So that's a me to me payment that's growing rapidly. The next step on from that is a commercial VRP type capability that there was a lot of chat at Open Banking expert about and we're one of the founders, sort of members of the Visa A2A scheme that's launched in the UK. Some news on that coming in the next few weeks. Maybe we come back and have a chat about what we're doing with that. And you know, that's going to enable account to account payments in a consumer to business flow. So what Pablo was describing there. So you suddenly expand that recurring payment into being able to pay bills, maybe pay subscriptions and at some point down the line maybe get into the e commerce space in there. So you suddenly start see the different options that are available in that I think the other. So that's sort of one thing is just from a product perspective how do we bring some of those to market and then how do we work with our European stakeholders to bring similar sort of capabilities. There's already, you know, Gyro API in Germany is looking to do something around the recurring so or is doing something around the recurring scheme. So how do we get involved in those things and, and make that available to our customers? I think that is really important. Then just the hygiene stuff which is continually looking at user journey. How do you make that as simple as possible? There's a lot of requirements on us from a regulatory standpoint. There's more of those coming down the line. How do we build that in an intelligent way? That means that you build trust and confidence with the end user but actually you make that journey as simple and easy as possible. The chip description was it's invisible. The consumer doesn't really know they're using open banking which is phenomenal but doesn't actually help me from an adoption perspective because if you don't know you've used it next time you see it, you don't necessarily know what it is. So we've got to, we've got to get over that. It's so good over here that if you come across it somewhere else you might not actually realize that you've used it before. So we've got to work on how we actually transition between those two things.
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A
It's so funny that open banking branding, branding problem. And actually at the Open Banking Expo it was interesting to see the expos called open banking but almost no one was referring to it as open banking banking. No, it was pay by bank, you know and, and, and in some ways that is better because it feels like the industry has moved forward. But you're right, if it's that passive.
- [30:12]
B
Then and an account top up isn't a pay by bank. So the other thing that we're all debating is well what do you call that? That's right because I'm topping up my account. I'm not paying, I'm topping up my wealth account or my savings account or my, I'm not necessarily not payment per se because I'm sending money to myself. So how we payment, what do we. This is, you know, the nuance of the. These are the things we talk. This is two days of being at Open Banking Expo. Though you're very much in the weeds.
- [30:40]
A
I was going to say this is some geeky open banking chat, but love it. And actually just on that note, we're going to take a quick pause here back shortly. Before we dive back into the news, a quick word about our latest insights episode. This week on FinTech Insider, we have something a little bit different for you. I recently attended the very first money 2020 Middle east in Saudi Arabia. So lots of endless quantities of Arab coffee, which absolutely delicious free swag and an inspiring startup scene. To dive deeper, we're revisiting an episode from a year ago that's still spot on. Benjamin Ensor is joined by Gaia Lamperti, Ziad Mebsut and Remo Aberdondola to explore the opportunities and challenges of launching FinTechs in the middle East. So whether you're expanding into the region or just curious about its fintech landscape, this episode is full of insights. Check it out in the same podcast feed as this one. And now back to the news. Okay, so this next one is from Business Wire. Paymentology Launches Paycredit to power credit innovation for Digital Banks and FinTechs Paymentology has launched Paycredit Pay Credit, a cloud first credit ledger platform designed to help financial institutions create flexible feature rich credit products quickly overcoming the constraints of legacy and debit based systems designed for modern credit needs. Paycredit supports revolving balances, installments and Buy Now, Pay later or bnpl, allowing issuers to tailor limits, interest rates, billing cycles and repayment models already adopted by digital banks. Paycredit helps issuers launch credit products with without full lending infrastructure. This aims to create new revenue streams enhancing customer engagement in markets where debit only offerings are limited. So Maroucha, first off, a huge congratulations on this launch and of course it only makes sense to talk to you about this. Having worked on projects in the sort of credit ledger world in the past, it is sometimes fiendishly complex. I mean, tell us, tell us why that is and how you're solving that problem.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. So firstly, we are so excited about our pay credit launch. This is something that's been in the works for a long time and one of the reasons why it's been in the works for a long time is because you're absolutely right, it is complex. It is complex, but it's also very important to get it right and to build it right from the ground up. So when you look at PayCredit, it's our new cloud first credit ledger and issuing platform. It's, it's purpose built. So you know, when we look at it, it was built to help digital banks and fintechs design, test and really launch modern credit products much faster. Whether it's revolving credit, whether it's installment plans, whether it's bnpl, it's credit built from the ground up. You know, it's, you know, really interactive and you know, when you look at things like billing cycles, nobody cares about billing cycles, right. But it has to work and it's got to be configurable and it's got to be something that is flexible, that works with the different digital banks and fintechs that you're working with. We also focus a lot on real time data and I think Pablo said it best. And funny enough, our very first pay credit customer is actually going to be in Mexico, which we're really excited about. And it really is all about data. It's about making sure that our customer have real time data that they can make real time insights and decisions. Data also allows our customers to make the right decisions around how they want to manage their debt. And so when you look at how we've built pay credit, we have built it off nothing. We started from the ground up. You know, we didn't take a debit card platform and try to retrofit it to make sense. We really said, look, we want this to be the most configurable credit card platform where customers can gradually grow from a very simple offering like bnpl, grow into installments and then full scale revolving credit. So yeah, we're excited and it's a lot of fun to be a part of this. Especially when we look at Mexico being our first country. We're very excited about the launch and.
- [35:02]
A
Maybe just to sort of deep dive into some of those problems because yeah, it can be really, really hard. And I guess what you're talking about in pract is that you have systems that are way more configurable and so therefore it's just much faster to build services, but also you can build more intelligent services I guess is what you're saying. How long would it take typically to, is there like a benchmark for how long it would take typically to put something like this together before this new world is.
- [35:28]
C
Yeah, I mean if you look at it right, a debit card program we can spin up in four to six weeks. It's already simple, it's Very easy to implement. Whereas credit card programs typically took six months to a year on average. Right. And it was because you're trying to square peg, round hole, right? You're trying to create different interest rate calculations in a debit card world, it just didn't make sense. And so it was a lot of trying to like make these nuts and bolts of all different sizes fit, and they just never really fit well. And so, so now when we look at how quickly it is to launch a credit card program, we can create testing within minutes, as in, our customers can test out our APIs, create a ledger, create an interest rate calculation which is specific to their market in minutes. They can test out hundreds of transactions on our UAT simulator within days. So now what we've done is we've taken in a 12 month project and we've made it six months max. And if you look at the customer in Mexico, it's actually less than three months. So we're really, really excited about just shortening that timeframe to get a customer live on credit.
- [36:47]
A
That's incredible. I'd love to bring in our other panelists on this because I guess what we're talking about here is the march of real time data and of digitization. And open banking is also an important, important part of this. I mean, is this basically saying like, you know, we could eventually reduce the reliance completely on legacy banking, banking systems and you know what, Ian, what do you think?
- [37:11]
B
That's a tricky one. Sat in the building that I'm sat in.
- [37:15]
A
Maybe I shouldn't have gone to you.
- [37:17]
B
I think that what's super exciting and actually I was really interested to hear what Pablo was talking about. The initial use cases being more around this area than perhaps where they are sort of in Europe. And we do see some, we do see open banking data used today in lending decisions. Is it everything it could be? No, it's not. You know, there's still a huge amount of legacy. There's still a huge amount of looking in the rearview mirror to see what happened six months ago, rather than looking at what's happening today into that data and making decisions on it. And we have access to, and the ability to look at the data today and create dynamic lending decisions. It doesn't, you know, if you've got people who are typically refused or are refused credit because they fail because of some legacy assessment that's been made, actually we have the information today to be able to look into their accounts and make dynamic decisions about how maybe they access credit and access other capabilities and facilities. That they haven't got today. So I'm super excited by what is, is coming down the track. And what it really requires is just a bit more understanding, I think from the risk teams in some of these organizations on how they use the data and how reliable it is and what insights they need to pull. Whether that's using machine learning, AI, with more AI getting into some of the models that we have. Yes, we've got to make sure that's done properly and in a way that builds trust with the end users. But I think, yeah, huge possibilities coming down the track for how we use this in a thoughtful combined way.
- [39:00]
C
And if I can add to that, Ian, it's such an interesting point because, for example, we work in a lot of emerging markets, whether it's Africa, whether it's lac, whether it's apac. And a lot of customers, like you said, underserved, underbanked, they don't have, they don't even qualify for a credit facility. Right. And so what a lot of our customers are thinking is, okay, let's start off with something very simple like bnpl. Let's build financial literacy. Let's start, let's help customers to create credit histories and credit profiles so that they can gradually, you know, move up to installments and then eventually full scale credit. So it's really about creating the thought process around how do we make credit more accessible to everybody by having these different layers and these different options of where is your customer right now? How much of a credit risk are they? Are we open to trust our customers and start to build out their history? So for us, it's emerging markets are key to building our credit. If we look at Africa, the penetration rates, especially when you look at the penetration rates across male versus female credit adoption Africa, it's scarily shocking. I won't even give you the stats, but those are the things that we need to change. Right? And when we look, one of the reasons why we're so passionate about doing this, launching pay credit is because it really is going to not just bringing revenue for our fintechs and our banking partners, but it really is changing the economic landscape across emerging markets. So yeah, it's just so interesting.
- [40:36]
A
Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Banking the unbanked, as you said Pablo earlier, it's a huge, huge potential opportunity coming up. Anything to add?
- [40:45]
D
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, look, when we think about innovations like pay credit, I think there's a, you know, the kind that the region needs. Right. And I think, you know, if you look at, especially Emerging markets. The way, you know, oftentimes the way people enter the money wheel is through credit, right? That's how. That's how people enter the money wheel. That's how people enter the prosperity wheel, Right? So if they don't get access to a loan or, you know, whatever type it may be, they can't invest, they can't prosper. Right. So I think that's particularly relevant in the market we serve and other markets like Maroucha was mentioning Africa and so on. But I think it's also relevant not only thinking about how can we kind of create the engines or the models to issue credit, but it's also like what's actually feeding those models. Right. And I think the lens that we bring here at Belvo from our work in Mexico and in Brazil is that even though still a very large portion of the population is unbanked, underbanked, or even if some say 40, 50% of folks still have a bank account today, which one might think that it's a relevant number, the actual principality or the transactionality that you get on those accounts is very slight in. Right? So even if you have a bank account, like, you can't really tell if that person's good for a loan or not. And forget about, because they don't have a loan, forget about getting a hit on the credit bureaus, right? So what you end up having is even if you have these models or these innovations, if you don't have a way of making the invisible visible, it's not going to work for you. Right? So I think that that's kind of actually one of the problems we've been solving for a lot of our customers, which is, okay, so today we're serving X percent of the population. We've never really thought about going beyond traditional data. And this is where kind of our concept of open finance kicks in, which is, as I was mentioning earlier, like tapping into additional data sources and turning them into insights such as, okay, so I might be able to connect to, to the Social Security database, for example, or the tax database. And with that, I get into the weeds and I'm able to tell you how much money this person is actually making and if they're good for a loan or not. So I think anything that helps and fosters better decision making, better underwriting, more loan issuing with better insights, 100% welcome. But obviously you need. The models are only as good as the data that powers them, right?
- [43:50]
A
Yeah, it's almost like that hunt for data to help bank these people is driving innovation itself. And actually, Pablo, that's a really good segue. Into the next news item we have, and this is from fenextra Revolut came its Mexico banking license. That was a segue. Revolut has received authorization from the National Banking and securities Commission. So that's CNBV and the bank of Mexico to operate as a multiple banking institution, enabling full banking operations in the country. This, I'll do this again. This move positions Revolut to tap into Mexico's significant cross border remittance market, which saw a record 63.3 billion in remittances in the previous year. This move aligns with its global Strategy to invest 10 billion pounds and create 10,000 jobs, targeting 100 million customers by mid-2027 and entering 30 new markets by 2030. So no small feat. Meanwhile, Revolut continues to face delays in securing a UK banking license, a key milestone for expanding its domestic bank banking services. So first off, I mean, I think it's important to mention that Revolut has been operational in Mexico for a few years now. I think it's like 2021 or 2022 when it started opening operations there. But Pablo, what's your view? Why Mexico as that landing point in Latin America?
- [45:19]
D
Yeah, you mentioned, I mean, Mexico being a market that Revolut was, you know, operate, operating in or started, you know, kind of working on since 2021 or 2022. Like I was, I'm actually a former Revoluter. Right. I was an early employee at Revolut and in my time, so in 20, you know, 17, 2018, folks are already working on the Revolut Mexico expansion. Right? So that's how far back it dates. But, but I think, you know, when it comes to like international expansion, I think the team at Revolut, you know, terrific job there, you know, it just comes to like, what, what big markets are there out there? What are our opportunities for our unique product positioning? And once, you know, the kind of the stakes are there, we go all in, right? And I think in Mexico, you know, you find a lot of the right ingredients. You know, it's a huge market, right? So second biggest country in Latin America. Massive proportion of the population still unbanked, underbanked. Very strong banking lobby. Right? So that the top banks, top five banks account for 60, 70% market share. One single bank, BBV, accounts for 35, 40% of deposits and loans and assets market share. So, so very high concentration. Right? But still on the flip side, a market that's very ripe for innovation, for disruption, and you're seeing over the past couple years how there's been a very big take up especially with younger generations with digital first product offerings. And Revolut is not the first neobank and there's a handful of neobanks and many homegrown and many regional growing, grown. They have been operating there for a while, but just the size of the opportunity, size of the market is just so big that it's a very, very attractive market. And I would say in the digital space very much still up for grabs, right?
- [47:35]
A
Yeah, it's just also such a huge population is there? So I feel like you touched it on it a little bit there. I mean, is there something about the regulator as well that makes Mexico more open for business maybe than some other countries in, in Latin America is the real kind of push to boost the fintech sector that you see?
- [47:55]
D
Well, I mean, look, I mean we're also a regulated business in Mexico on the payment side of the business. I will tell you that the Mexican regulator, from experience working in other countries is not particularly friendly when it comes to fintech or even when it comes to, you know, you getting a banking license from scratch. But I guess in Revolut's case and other upstarts or digital banks that have gotten their licenses over the past few quarters or years, or you see Nubank for example, they started with a lending type of license where they could issue some products and now they fully transition to a banking license. You see Mercado Pajo also. So transitioning to a full banking license, I think, you know, the requirements are clear and if you kind of file your, if you submit your file and everything kind of makes sense, you check all the boxes, you'll get the license. Right. So there might be some delays here or there, but I think in the specific case of revolution, like you might not get the level of scrutiny that you might get in other parts of the world where you might have already been operating for a while. You're maybe like a larger digital incumbent. I think here in the case of Mexico, you know, Revolut just starting from scratch, they had everything set up properly, did a great job, you know, working on all the basics, on all the infrastructure, on getting everything set up and, and they got it by just following what the regulator said. But by no means. I would say the regulator in Mexico is particularly friendly, especially if you compare them to Brazil for example, where the regular is much more pro innovation. They're much more in favor of digital banks growing and putting pressure quite frankly on legacy players and on incumbents.
- [50:02]
C
As well.
- [50:02]
A
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for that run through Pablo. It was fascinating. And on that note, we're just going to take a quick pause here back shortly. Okay, now for a quick look at one more newsworthy story this week that we don't have time to cover in full, but we think you will find just as interesting. And this one is from Financial IT Zilch and Plaid Partner to Integrate Open Banking into Retail Zilch has partnered with Plaid to integrate open banking into its repayment experience, allowing customers to use the pay by bank method for one off repayments directly from their bank account. So that's exactly the conversation that we've been having today. The integration leverages Plaid's virtual account capabilities, enhancing settlement, tracking and refund functionality, which simplifies reconciliation and reduces overheads. For Zilch, the partnership comes as open banking usage in the UK reaches 15 million users, so that's nearly 1 in 3 UK adults, indicating increasing customer uptake and the potential for scalable repayment innovations. Zilch plans to release Zilch Pay in the first half of 2026, a one click button that will integrate its app, digital wallet and card at checkout, enhancing the shopping experience for customers. So to give us more information on this partnership, we have a voice note from Joe Zender, Chief Product Officer at Zilch. Hi, I'm Joe Zenda, Chief Products Officer at Zilch, the consumer payments platform platform, and I'm excited to share that we have just announced a new partnership with Plaid, one of the world's leading open banking platforms. Together, we're integrating open banking into Zilch's repayment experience, Giving our over 5 million registered customers an even smarter and more flexible way to manage their payments. With this partnership, Zilch customers can now use pay by bank for one off repayments, allowing them to repay directly from their bank account in just a few tasks apps. It's fast, secure, flexible and completely frictionless. And the timing is ideal. With open banking adoption continuing to soar in the uk. At Zilch, our mission has always been to make payments smarter, simpler and more affordable, and partnering with Plaid is another major step towards that. And we won't be stopping there. Next year we're launching Zilch Pay, our one click button that brings Zilch directly to online checkouts so you'll be able to pay, earn rewards and stay in control of your spending all in one seamless experience. This is all part of how we're building the consumer payments platform that powers the future of commerce. And finally now time for something a little bit different and maybe a bit weird from the world of business to finish this week's show. This One is the FinTech Halloween finisher. Which FinTech would you bring back from the day dead Discuss. There are many. So first off, that is a large graveyard. Very, very large graveyard. Some for very good reasons, some unfortunate.
- [52:58]
B
It was a really interesting one. I posed it to the office. Actually a bunch of. I went around the office polling for ideas cause I think I try and forget them when I was gone. And then I had a little Google and if you Google how much money was invested in failed fintechs over the last last five years, that's a scary number. That's a lot of naughts at the end of that. And then the next qualification was which ones can I actually say because they didn't get shut down because they were so illegal that they were found to be so bad that they had to go. And the list then gets quite short. But the top one, mine was very boring. Well, mine was safe. So I really liked the Zing travel app mainly because we provided the account funding for it. But it was a very cool use case. I like the ux. I thought it looked brilliant but it just didn't work economically for them. Whatever they decided not to do it. But I thought as a, as a thing it looked cool, it worked really well. But the top scoring in the office was actually football index. I don't know if anybody remembers football index. So where you could. And I didn't know what this was, I had to go and I had to ask Tim. But you could effectively buy a share. It was like, well, I'm going to put it in Ian Simplification. So bit like fantasy football. You sort of invested in the players that you thought were going to do well and then if they performed well you got a dividend on their performance. So you could. For the football loving, fun investor, it was quite good fun. Although everyone I spoke to didn't do particularly well out of it. But it definitely scored high on the fun entertaining fintech tech and it didn't get shut down too badly. So I felt like I could, I could raise that one.
- [54:46]
A
Yeah, I committed a big podcast sin just now and googled it and it does indeed say, Ian, that lots of people are trying to, trying to get their money back. So yeah, that's not a, that's not a great example.
- [55:02]
B
It's not ideal, but there you go. That was the one that people thought was fun. So yeah, But Zing, Zing was my safety one where I said, actually that was the one that I really liked.
- [55:10]
C
And Ian, I'm probably going to jump onto that bandwagon as well, because you're right, it was just such a phenomenal. It just looked great people, honestly, when you saw it, you were like, oh, this is an amazing customer experience. So definitely Zane. But going down that track, I'll say a couple of things, right? There are so many digital banks that started off too early, right? So if you look at simple, if you look at injures, you know, prior to Covid, there was some amazing digital banks that, you know, they were doing branchless banking and all this cool stuff and I think the markets just weren't ready for them. They had great interfaces, they understood the customer experience. Customers just weren't ready. And I think Covid really helped to catapult that need for digitization in the consumer and changing consumer habits and behaviors. And I think if you did get banks like Zingers or Simple Comeback, they might actually do really, really well because they had a really good understanding of what customers needed in a. So that would be the ones that I would. Those would be the ones that I bring back.
- [56:10]
A
Oh, that's such a profound point. Maruxa. Yeah, there's definitely a timing aspect to so much of this. Yeah, we had simple as well. I just asked a few people as well before this and a lot of people are like, oh, simple. Yeah, that could have been a good one. Any thoughts, Pablo?
- [56:27]
D
Yeah, on my end, I mean, I'll look the US a little bit and maybe bring back one of the, I guess OGs of fintech I think before, before fintech actually existed. And I mean, I'll say mint.com?
- [56:41]
A
Mint.
- [56:41]
D
Right. So yeah, so you know, obviously great product and you know, kind of PFM like product before, you know, PFM ever existed or before fintech ever existed, you know, known to be acquired by Intuit some time ago and you know, shut down, merge, Flash, whatever with credit cards, pharma. And yeah, I mean I lived for a while in the US was an avid user of mint.com and yeah, it was sad to see them go. But you know, users are like massive fans, right? I mean I still haven't found a PFM app quite like Mint.
- [57:23]
A
Yeah, I'm glad you raised Mint. I'd forgotten about that. You're right because I think maybe they made fintech like they. Because they were the first fintech before fintech actually. So it's really worth, it's worth A shout out.
- [57:37]
B
You could probably do a whole blog, a whole podcast, couldn't you? Definitely went and did some prep on one of these fintechs that didn't quite make it.
- [57:45]
A
Yeah. And which belong in the graveyard for some very, very good reasons. I mean one of the controversial just in chatting to some people before this, one of the controversial one is not Meg in the graveyard, is it in the graveyard? So it was just acquired by jp. I'm a, I'm a. Full disclosure, I'm a nutmeg customer. Love nutmeg. They, they were acquired by JP Morgan and they're just retiring the brand. So at least the brand in some ways is, is dying. It's just quite a fascinating story about what's happening in that, in that sector. So I gotta say everyone, we actually ended up by talking way more profoundly about that than I thought we were. So that's brilliant. And, and on that note, that wraps up today's spooktacular fintech fintechn news. Thank you so much to today's guests. Where can people find out a little bit more about you and your companies, Ian?
- [58:38]
B
LinkedIn obviously. And then tink.com if you want to know more about Tink, but give us a call.
- [58:43]
A
Awesome. And Marusha.
- [58:45]
C
So definitely our website, paymentology.com you know, go to the Ishua Academy as well to see our podcast and of course on LinkedIn. Always happy to connect. Connect.
- [58:55]
A
And Pablo, where can we find you?
- [58:57]
D
You can find us on bellevo.com and also on LinkedIn.com Belvo Finance. Amazing.
- [59:04]
A
And as for me, it's on LinkedIn at davidbg or 11fs.com. Thank you so much for listening to today's Fintech Insider. If you like what you heard, please make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform of choice. And if you really like what you've heard, why not share the podcast with a colleague or friend? Go on, do it. As always, if you want to join the conversation, find us on social media. Just search for 11 FS or FinTech Insider or email podcastlevs.com thanks very much and goodbye.