News: All about partnerships: Barclays x CommonAI, Monzo x Fair4All Finance, Stripe x Lloyds

**Laura Watkins** (0:05)
This is Fintech Insider News. This week, Barclays backs UK AI innovation with investment in Common AI, Monzo partners Fair4All Finance on cards for Brits with poor credit scores, and Stripe and Lloyds debut payment suite for UK small businesses. We'll be tackling all of this and more on today's news show, so don't go anywhere.

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**Laura Watkins** (0:55)
Hello, and welcome to episode 1072 of Fintech Insider News, brought to you by 11FS, the sixth time consultancy of the year that works with financial providers, big and small, to build the next generation of financial services.
I'm Laura Watkins, Director of Media and Marketing here at 11FS, and to help me unpack the biggest and most interesting stories from Fintech and financial services from the past week, I'm joined by a brilliant panel of guests. First up, we have a welcome back to the show for Mei Lim, Group CFO and Managing Partner of Anthemis. It's great to see you again, Mei. Can you remind the listeners a little bit about yourself and Anthemis?

**Mei Lim** (1:30)
Thanks, Laura. Really great to be back here again. Thanks for having me back.
Mei, our Managing Partner at Anthemis. For those who don't know us, Anthemis is a VC investor. We've been investing for 15 years. We have about 150 portfolio companies in the US, UK, Europe predominantly. The thesis is around Invisible Finance and more recently now, High Assurance AI. We have a lot of investments as well in diverse founders. We're a big supporter of D, E and I, and we are based both here in London as well as New York.
We recently co-founded a platform called CommonAI, which we launched in September last year, and I had the privilege of coming to 11FS to talk about that. I'm so excited to be here today to talk more about the developments we've had in CommonAI.

**Laura Watkins** (2:32)
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, we will be getting right into that very, very shortly. But next up on the panel, we also have Diana Kamil-Salmon, Associate Director at Fair4All Finance. Welcome to the podcast. Please, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and Fair4All Finance?

**Diana Kamil-Salmon** (2:50)
Hi Laura. Thank you. It's great to be in the show. It's my debut. I'm so excited for that.
I am the Associate Director of Commercial Propositions at Fair4All Finance. And Fair4All Finance are a not-for-profit organization that was set up in 2019
So our remit and our goal is to focus on financial inclusion in England. There are over 20 million people in financially vulnerable circumstances who need support and access to products and services to improve their financial lives. So the work that we do is around funding and developing pieces of research to identify the gaps and the consumer needs. We also innovate and partner with organizations to deliver products and services directly to people. So we kind of fund innovation in the sector like the partnership with Monzo, which we'll be hearing a little bit more about later.

**Laura Watkins** (3:40)
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us. That is a scarily high statistic there. So thanks for being here and for all the work that you do. And we will dig into that very, very shortly. But last but not least, concluding our panel, we have Merusha Naidu, Global Head of Partnerships at Paymentology. Welcome back. For those unaware, please can you remind our listeners a little bit about yourself and Paymentology and your role there? Yes.

**Merusha Naidu** (4:04)
Thanks for having me Laura. I must say it's always a privilege to be a part of the elevenFS podcast. Merusha Naidu, Global Head of Partnerships. I look after all of the strategic initiatives with all of our partners across schemes, capability partners, as well as resellers and distribution partners.
When you look at Paymentology, we've been in the news quite a lot recently with our recent investment, the launch of our new platform. But ultimately, Paymentology is a global next-gen issuer processor. We believe that infrastructure is the way to unlock new digital technologies across all financial services, and we sit at the heart of that. It's really brilliant to be here and excited to unpack some of these exciting stories.

**Laura Watkins** (4:48)
Absolutely. On that note, let's jump right into the first one. Our first story today is that Barclays has backed UK AI innovation with investment in CommonAI. The story in FinExtra. Barclays has invested in CommonAI, a collaborative engineering and computing platform launched by Anthemis and Cambridge AI venture partners to support the growth of AI-enabled businesses across the UK and Europe. The platform brings together startups, enterprises, engineers, and academics providing access to AI models, training data, hardware design, and computing power that might otherwise be out of reach for many organizations.