News: Can anyone stop Revolut? Can Countingup and Griffin tackle SME pain? Can the FCA help UK fintechs scale?

**Ross Gallagher** (0:05)
This is Fintech Insider News this week. Can anyone actually stop Revolut as it lands a French banking license?
Can Countingup and Griffin make running a small business less painful? And can the FCA help Teya and other UK Fintechs scale into global success stories? We'll be talking all of this and more on today's new show, so please don't go anywhere.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
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**Ross Gallagher** (1:07)
Hello and welcome to Episode 1090 of Fintech Insider News, brought to you by 11FS, the sixth time consultancy of the year that works with financial providers, both big and small, to build the next generation of financial services.
I'm Ross Gallagher, the head of consulting here at 11FS. Now, to help me unpack the biggest and most interesting stories from Fintech and financial services from the past week, I'm joined by a quite brilliant panel of guests. First up, we have Phoebe Wallis, the Chief Revenue Officer at Griffin. Phoebe, it's really lovely to have you. I know you've got some exciting news that we'll get to shortly, but I don't know, do you want to start maybe just by introducing yourself to our listeners and maybe telling us a little bit more about Griffin as well?

**Phoebe Wallis** (1:50)
Sure. Thank you for having me.
As you've just kindly said, I'm Phoebe. I'm Griffin's Chief Revenue Officer. We're a UK only API-first bank, and we provide Fintechs and then anyone else, the infrastructure and the license to offer financial services products, which is what a bulk of today is about. We're big believers in contextual finance and supporting firms bring real value to market with financial services products that consumers and businesses like really want and need.

**Ross Gallagher** (2:24)
Amazing. Thanks, Phoebe. It's lovely to have you.
Next up, we have a very warm welcome back to the show for Veronica Glab, the strategic partnerships lead at Juice. Veronica, it's always a pleasure. How are things going with you and Juice?

**Phoebe Wallis** (2:42)
Well, it's definitely a busy August, absolutely no slowdown on my side.
For anyone who's not familiar with Juice, we are a UK-based SME lender. And we've actually just launched Juice Now, which is a smaller credit facility from 5 to 150K for businesses who really want that turnover and approval in 24 hours. Quick decision and all terms explained before you sign. And then me personally, I am gearing up to speak at Fintech Meetup in October in Lisbon. So I will also be organizing community events for Fintech founders and VCs coming from Southern Europe and here in the Lisbon area.

**Ross Gallagher** (3:25)
Love it. Busy as always.

**Phoebe Wallis** (3:28)
Never stops.

**Ross Gallagher** (3:29)
No, that's good. That's the way we like it. Lovely to see Veronica as always.
And last but not least, we have a welcome to the show for Tom Mylrea-Lowndes, General Counsel and Head of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs at Teya. Tom, welcome to the show. It's lovely to have you. I know you also have some exciting news that we'll get into shortly, but if you wouldn't mind, first just maybe giving us a little bit of an introduction both to yourself and Teya.

**Tom Mylrea-Lowndes** (3:55)
Sure. Longtime listener. Delighted to join.
So Teya, our aim is to be the primary financial services provider for local independent businesses. We started with a focus on payments where we've built sort of a best-in-class proposition, and now we include the business account as well as the credit proposition. We had Alessandra, our Chief Product Officer, I believe on one of our earlier episodes. So she went into a bit more detail of the summer release. But to give you a bit of an idea of size, we're present in nine markets across the UK and Europe, serve 75,000 members at this time. Yeah, I myself, I joined early on in the journey. I built the legal team, the compliance team, the privacy team, policy team, later the risk team, and as you said, I currently serve as the General Council and Head of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs. So really my role is to ensure we abide by, obviously, all of the regulatory obligations, but also then the commitments we make to our members. And I guess my passion is also advocating for policy changes on that front.