News: Ramp hits $60bn valuation, UK venture capital breaks records, and Bank of America and Amex face AML fines

Ross Gallagher (0:04)

This is Fintech Insider News. This week, Ramp reportedly hits $60 billion valuation in $1.85 billion funding round.

UK venture capital reports largest fundraising quarter on record in Q3. And Bank of America and Amex hit with combined $1.55 billion in AML fines. We'll be tackling all of this and more on today's news, so please don't go anywhere.

Joe Parkin (0:33)

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SPEAKER_3 (0:49)

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Joe Parkin (0:53)

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Ross Gallagher (1:08)

Hello and welcome to episode 1108 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 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 brilliant panel of guests. First up, we have a welcome back to the podcast for Joe Parkin, the managing partner of FG Partners. Joe, welcome back to the show. Maybe you wouldn't mind just reintroducing both yourself and FG Partners to our listeners.

Joe Parkin (1:45)

Hey, it's nice to be back. Thanks, Ross.

My name is Joe Parkin. I am an advisor to a number of businesses in the fintech space. Hayes Mac, a UK account in the advisory business, Verare CTFs, a thematic ETF business, Salad Money, consumer lending business, and Instinct Digital Data Reporting business. I spend my time working with the management teams of those businesses in order to grow them.

Ross Gallagher (2:09)

Nice. We had Alex on from Salad Money last week.

SPEAKER_3 (2:12)

Yeah, exactly. That's a nice continuity.

Ross Gallagher (2:14)

I was just on from a call as well, I'll say. I love it. Cool.

SPEAKER_3 (2:17)

All right.

Ross Gallagher (2:17)

Well, great to have you, Joe.

Thanks for joining us to share your perspectives on the stories. We also have a welcome to the show for Kemi Odusan, the Head of Growth at Spectre. Kemi, welcome. It's lovely to have you. Again, maybe you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your role at Spectre.

Kemi Odusan (2:33)

Hey, Ross. It's great to be joining for the first time. As Ross said, Head of Growth at Spectre, I actually started out my career as an investment banker and worked across both PE and VC.

At Spectre, we like to describe ourselves as mission control for regulated growth. That means bringing onboarding, monitoring, investigations together under one platform. Allowing compliance teams to set the rules, product teams to build freely, and operations teams to run everything at scale with AI doing a lot of the heavy work.

Ross Gallagher (3:03)

Excellent. We'll definitely be picking that compliance brain then as we go through some of these stories. I think they're quite relevant, Kemi, so it's lovely to have you. Last but not least, another warm welcome to the show for Marit Rødevand, the CEO and co-founder of Strize.

Marit, welcome to the show. It's lovely to have you. Again, maybe you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself and also telling us a little bit about Strize.

Marit Rødevand (3:25)

Yeah. My name is Marit. I'm co-founder and CEO of Strize. We're a Norwegian technology business with offices in Oslo and London. We also build for banks and we work with network analysis, so that banks can understand who they do business with. So automating a lot of that, KYB, KYC, onboarding, AML, all that fun stuff. Yeah. You said in your intro that you had over 1,100 episodes, and we have a podcast at Strize called The Laundry, and I just felt suddenly very small with 180 episodes. So now I know I have to do a lot of catching up to get to your level.

Ross Gallagher (4:06)

Well, Marit, if it makes you feel any better, it's taken us the best part of a decade to get this far. So it sounds like you're already well on the way.

Marit Rødevand (4:15)

Yeah. But motivational, I'll also get to the 1,100 number.

Ross Gallagher (4:20)

Exactly. Well, you'll have to come back on when you do and tell us all about it.

Marit Rødevand (4:24)

All right.

Ross Gallagher (4:25)

Well, look, that is our wonderful panel. So let's get going. We are starting with a very significant story this week. This one comes from Fintech Futures with a headline, Ramp Reportedly Hits 60 Billion Dollar Valuation in 1.85 Billion Dollar Funding Round.