News: UK fintech funding hits a decade low, NatWest backs accessible banking, and Pay.com.au takes on America

**Kate Moody** (0:04)
This is Fintech Insider News this week. UK Fintech funding hits lowest level in a decade, NatWest partners with Be My Eyes to make banking more accessible, and pay.com.au brings Aussie Rewards Platform to the US. We'll be tackling all of this and more on today's news show, so don't go anywhere.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
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**Kate Moody** (1:03)
Hello, and welcome to Episode 1094 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 Kate Moody, Customer Strategy Director at 11FS, and to help me unpack the biggest and most interesting stories from Fintech and financial services from the past week, I've luckily been joined by a brilliant panel of guests. First up, we have a welcome to the podcast for Clare Black, COO at Center for Finance, Innovation and Technology, otherwise known as CFIT. Welcome to the show Clare, would you mind, I'm sure a lot of our listeners have heard of CFIT, but would you mind maybe giving them an intro to CFIT and to yourself, please? Absolutely. Yes. I've been at CFIT for 18 months now.
Previously to that, I've had a varied career in journalism at Reuters. I've worked in capital markets, in derivatives markets as a consultant, and then moved more into the innovation side of things. I'm in 2018 when I joined Innovate Finance and have stayed in that world ever since.
I really like the excitement of the innovation of the fintech sector. CFIT was starting to broaden out of pure financial services as well which is really exciting. CFIT is an independent neutral convener, was born out of the Calipha review, so that Ron Calipha pulled together for the government, looking at how the UK become a leader in fintech and how it could retain that position. We bring together industry, government, regulators. I call it supreme cat herding. Definitely feels like that at times, but we basically tackle systemic challenges that can't be solved by one single organization or industry alone, and we're trying to turn innovation into practical solutions. So we work closely with government when it makes sense. So we've recently been a delivery partner for DBT's smart data strategy, and that's looking into how you can use smart data to look at improving the UK home buying process, so open property.
Then we have been funded by HMT from the very start and working with them to support the growth and competitiveness agenda in financial services. I say we're moving from, we're still clearly going to be convening, moving more into delivery itself with industry and government co-investing so that we can get government coming in where there's that market failure, where there's a gap, trying to bring everyone around the table to think about how we can solve that problem and then hopefully showing the art of the possible so that industry can then take it and really run with it and scale it and deliver it to the market. So that's what we're up to. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks very much for the overview and thanks for taking the time to join us. We're really looking forward to getting your perspective on the news today. We also have a welcome back to the show for Joe Parkin, Managing Partner at FG Partners. Welcome back to the show, Joe. Always good to have you on. Again, would you mind just giving our listeners, maybe new listeners in particular, a bit of a refresh on yourself and your role at FG Partners, please?

**Joe Parkin** (4:06)
Yeah, sure. So thank you. It's great to be back after an extended hiatus. I think my last appearance on the show was in January 2020, just before COVID, where I was at BlackRock, where I ran the iShares ETF business, the digital wealth business. I was the Fintech guy. Since then, I founded and exited a business called the Fintech Growth Fund. The Fintech Growth Fund was also one of the main recognitions off the back of the Khalifa review.
A group of passionate individuals got together and launched that business. It was a growth stage investment fund focused on Fintech, so Series B plus, the 5-10 million of revenue businesses.