http://civilwarbummer.com/page/2/ In a very interesting piece about a financial services conference, I found out about Victoria Raffe, a former bank regulator in the UK, now an independent consultant, talking about the process of getting approval for new banks in the UK. As someone following closely fintech startups like Moven (and Simple before that) and others that deliver […]
Category: FinTech
The New Age of Algorithms
I come from an engineering background, for me computers were, for a long time, calculators, a tool to perform either complex calculations, or on large data sets. Otherwise a handheld calculator – standard in my university years – would have been more than enough. Computers were expensive, data entry was a pain, and output was […]
Q&A with SBT Venture Capital
1.What is your definition of fintech? My view is that fintech is a misnomer, but good as a shortcut name. What we really mean is the disruption of financial services through technologies like mobile, cloud, social, big data analytics, crypto, etc — and whatever will be invented in the years to come. While financial services companies […]
Getting To Know You, or Why We Invested in IdentityMind
We have recently announced our investment in IdentityMind Global, a software-as-a-service company that provides technology solutions for mitigation against financial crimes like identity fraud and money laundering. The problem of fraud and financial crime has always been with us, before computers and the internet. And as the financial system evolved, so has financial crime. In the age of e-commerce, with an […]
Why We (Sometimes) Invest
Our job at SBT Venture Capital is to invest in startups. To a novice, it sounds simple, until you realize there are thousands of startups, at various stages, and we need to narrow it down to a manageable list of teams that we can work with. I wrote recently about our filtering process, the “why […]
The Startup Team: 4 + 3 = 1
The days of building something really innovative on your own are long gone. Edison – the prototypical inventor – had a huge lab and many assistants. Steve Jobs led teams of innovators. I have been arguing for a while, in corporate environments and my blog, that no sane company should reward individual contribution/results and settle […]
Why We Don’t Invest…
In our work at STB Venture Capital we see hundreds of financial technology (“fintech”) companies. We ask all companies to submit their startup profile through the Gust web site — our submission page is here. Most of the time, we have to reject a proposal because it does not fit our preferred profile – we […]
Innovation Teams and Innovation Culture
In a sense, life is simpler in a startup — you have an idea, you select a team, you get some money to start, build the product, launch, and try to make money from customers that love your product. If you fail at any of those steps, you learn and start over. The innovation culture […]
The Vanishing Custom Electronics or Why We Invested in Mobeewave
This will be a short blog post, as I have already blogged before about my thinking regarding investing in mobile payments and the concept of “software defined anything“. In summary, I believe that we will have less and less specialised hardware devices for payments, and the ubiquitous mobile phone will become the default form factor […]
Fintech Thoughts
Many years ago, I was working for a large Canadian bank, managing two very different development teams — one using C++ to build a derivatives trading system, and one of Cobol programmers maintaining the bank General Ledger application. While the culture clash was obvious to any observer, nothing reflected it better than the big poster […]