1024. Insights: The moments that made fintech in 2025

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1:03Hello, and welcome to Fintech Insider Insights by 11FS. I'm your host, Laura Watkins, and today we've got a very special episode to round off what has honestly been an amazing year of content. Here at 11FS, we rarely get the chance to hit pause and look back at everything that's happened in fintech over the past 12 months, and a lot has happened. Seriously, some of it brilliant, some of it bewildering, some of it, did that really just happen? We've talked to experts around the business and polled our community to help us shine a light on the stories that might have slipped under your radar. The fintech feel-good story of the year, the buzzword of the year.

1:36Yes, think of it as the 11FS Cambridge Dictionary entry. The partnership that blindsided us all. The fintech glow-up of the year. No, we're not just talking about a rebrand. And of course, we'll pause for that one jaw-dropping moment that made everyone go WTF. There's quite a lot to get through. So to help me take a trip back into the archives, I'm joined by two absolute 11FS powerhouses from our Ventures and Pulse teams, Honestly, who better? So first up, David Barton Grimley, Director of Strategy and Head of Product at 11FS Ventures. Welcome. You'll sadly be stepping down from your podcast hosting duties very soon.

2:11But before you go, please could we have your standout moment from 2025? I mean, first off, Laura, I have never been described as a powerhouse before. So that's kind of amazing. But yeah, it's been a real privilege to be a part of the podcast and a part of 11FS over the last, I think it's like three and a half years. So I'm very humbled by the skills and talent that exist in this company. It's just, it's kind of incredible. Stand-up moment from 2025. I've interviewed so many people. I think Izzy, our producer, told me I've done something like 50 or something this year, something like that podcast.

2:47But I think that the one that stands out for me the most is the interview I had with Stathis at Google Cloud. really I mean Stathis just has an amazing way of deconstructing agentic AI what it is how it works how it doesn't work how to actually you know build off it so I'd highly encourage everyone to go and find that episode in your podcast feed but yeah also Stathis is just a great guy and the ability to break down something really complicated in an accessible way is such a great skill next up we have Joe Colchester head of product at 11FS Pulse welcome to the show. What's something you've worked on this year at 11FS that really made you pause and think, yeah, that was pretty great?

3:29Thank you so much for having me back. I think one thing we're really proud of at Pulse delivering this year is the enhancements we've made to the brand page. So we've started pulling in loads of data from the apps around the Play Store and off the back of that, pulling our own sentiment analysis so we can find out how people are talking about apps, key themes and key words derived from that. And what we're finding is that a lot of people are just hanging out on that page to dig deeper into what people are saying about their customer support, their UX, their account service, and this kind of thing.

4:03So that's been a hugely successful launch for Pulse and has made the platform a lot more sticky, which is great. Amazing. Well, congrats on that. And yeah, obviously just giving people deeper insights is what Pulse is all about. So that is a huge addition to the platform. for me i think my moment of the year is obviously self-indulgent but cannot pass without mention is episode a thousand of this very podcast yes quite the milestone for our little b2b podcast in fintech i think a b2b podcast in general to have lasted a thousand episodes is an achievement but you know adding on the extra industry niche and so on and so forth um yeah it's just an amazing milestone and also we just had a lot of fun recording that episode, if you remember.

4:48We had Prosecco, we had cake. Prosecco went on the cake. It was good fun. So now that we've got our dream team of experts assembled, shall we crack open this yearbook and dive in? Our first category today is the feel-good FinTech story of the year. So this is celebrating the initiative, breakthrough, or moment that has genuinely made the industry feel good, giving further proof that fintech's heart is as strong as its tech. This is the story that made the whole community collectively say more of this, please. So before we dive into it, a few notable other mentions in this category go to the decision to teach financial education to children in UK schools that we were very excited about.

5:29And also, and slightly more adjacently, a drop in children swallowing coins reported by the NHS, which is equally a big win for fintech in its own way. as we go more digital, there's less chance of kids swallowing coins, I guess. The main shout out for this category goes to Project Nemo expands in the UK to boost disability inclusion in fintech. Talked about it a lot on this show, but as a reminder, the initiative is a grassroots not-for-profit campaign created to push fintech firms to build products, services and workplaces that are accessible to people with disabilities. They teamed up with HSBC Innovation Banking UK to help fintech firms assess and improve accessibility, offering training and direct feedback on product design.

6:12And in October 2025, Project Nemo was named overall winner of the inaugural Diamond Grand Prix Award at Money 2020 USA for its transformative approach to disability inclusion in fintech. The award comes at a time when the UK government is preparing to publish a broader financial inclusion strategy, potentially giving Project Nemo even more influence over future policy and industry standards. To tell us more about this brilliant initiative, we have a voice note from Project Nemo, Let's hear from Joanne Dewar now. My highlight for 2025 has to be to have seen the wonderful volunteer team of Project Nemo be recognised as European FinTech Team of the Year at the European FinTech Awards.

6:57And then most recently in Vegas winning the Diamond Grand Prix for driving transformational change. Project Nemo has three key plans for 2026. Firstly, launching a resource hub, which includes all the content that we've created over the past year, but also a curation of other content that's available and highlighting those that are able to help our industry move forwards on their disability inclusion and accessibility journeys. We're going to be holding our industry's feet to the fire to continue to hold the space to progress accessibility and disability inclusion as an industry. And then watch this space for what may materialise from our Learning Disabilities Safe Spending project.

7:47Amazing. A lot of foreshadowing of things to come from Joanne there, which is really, really great. Joe, as your sort of take on everything that Project Nemo have achieved and sort of why is accessible design really difficult to achieve and why Project Nemo needs to exist? Yeah, well, I think Project Nemo has done such a good job at highlighting the scale of the problem and really making that much, much better known because it's been there, but it's not been widely talked about enough. and also Joe and those volunteers around her building up momentum around it. So it's now getting to a stage where people are thinking, I don't want to be left out of this, where previously it was slightly more fringe and a bit more of a box-ticking exercise when it actually came to transforming that change and delivering that change because I think there are certain things that have always been there, like kind of WCAG checklist and this kind of thing, but what Joe and her team are doing are kind of through lived experiences actually coming up with the meaningful things that you can and should deliver to make sure that some of the problem is addressed.

8:55Yeah, absolutely. And some of their evidence suggests that accessibility does not mean just catering for a minority. Often it makes the experience better for the majority as well, right? Absolutely, yeah. I think we found that a lot of the developments in user experience in tech have often come from helping those in need first and then actually, as you say, translates into the mass market. Like I think predictive text, for example, initially came from helping people with motor issues. Yeah, because they could just do it quicker. Oh, I didn't know that either, but that's amazing. I used predictive text all the time.

9:28Yeah, yeah, yeah. So actually, we really look forward to things like car mode and all these things coming our way. We haven't seen that much innovation in, say, card management in ages. Perhaps this could be the vehicle that delivers it, not for just those with disabilities, but the wider market as well. Amazing, yeah. And David, bringing you in, Joe was talking about that kind of FOMO piece in terms of like companies sort of, you know, if I have to do this, I will. But now that they're sort of afraid of being left out of the experience, do you think that that's kind of a differentiator perhaps?

10:03Yeah, I mean, it should be. And, you know, I think as you've said, like the FS industry overall has really, really struggled with this. And it's sort of a little bit puzzling why, Because if you just think about it, there's all sorts of research out there which shows that, you know, a more diverse workforce, a more diverse board, a more diverse XCO just results in much better financial performance for the company. So, you know, if you want to just be really brutally incentivist about this, then the incentives should really align. But for whatever reason, it's been very, very hard to sort of break through the board.

10:38And I think there's also other things in there as well, like, you know, just training and upskilling people from all sorts of backgrounds and, you know, the whole neurodiversity aspect as well is also very, very important. So I do hope that projects like Project Nemo are the sort of like, you know, flag that people can follow. And if it is a question of people following that flag, then that's okay. That's fine. you know whatever whatever enhances the situation yeah definitely and they've you know they've done such an amazing job in the last i'm not quite sure how old project new is you at least a year year and a half maybe more um so much so that they're kind of beginning to influence the kind of financial inclusion strategy at kind of government level like that is an amazing cut through right yeah and that financial inclusion strategy is actually um incredibly interesting because it um it touches a little bit on what you were saying joe in that some of the features that you develop for, you know, say a segment of society who needs accessibility can actually move to everybody else.

11:46And I think that is what the UK government is also trying to do, right? So fair access to credit, you're making sure that people are not taken advantage of. Well, okay, that's great for vulnerable populations, but that's also great for everybody. And I think that's what the UK government is trying to do with the inclusion strategy. let's see what happens on that based on the sort of initiatives that Joe mentioned are coming up what would you like to see happen in this space next year maybe from a product perspective well I think it needs to stop being thought accessibility as an afterthought and actually be delivered from the ground up and I think we understand why that's happening currently because the happy path is the easiest to design is intuitive way of doing it.

12:34Often no one in the team could have some of these disabilities. So you assume that everyone can kind of get along fine. But I think what Project Nemo will do and hopefully we'll start seeing some transformation here is either through the resource hub or some of the actual solutions that they'll deliver, that thinking will be done on their behalf and people will know where to look as opposed to just the checklist. The checklist can be helpful, but there's a lot more than that. So I think, yeah, addressing some of those issues and thinking about it to begin with, rather than, oh, damn, we need to think about accessibility.

13:10Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess Project Nemo's ultimate aim, and I don't wish to speak for Joanne because I don't know this for certain, is not to exist, right? Because they've done their job if everybody is taking this, you know, from the ground up when it comes to building for accessibility. Like, as you say, it's like, it's having it as part of the product roadmap in the first place rather than as an add-on. Fantastic. Okay, well, that was a nice start. Feel good. I'm going to move us on now to our next category, which is buzzword of the year. I'm sure you can imagine what the outcome is here.

13:41But this is honoring the term that dominated pitch decks, panels, product meetings, and every other corner of the fintech universe. It's the phrase that launched a thousand LinkedIn posts because no fintech cycle is complete without a shiny new buzzword. Honorable mentions for this category were the actual Collins Dictionary Word of the Year, which was vibe coding, and the one that everyone won't stop talking about, and don't worry, we will equally be talking about it soon as well, which was stablecoin. But here on FinTech Insider, our buzzword of the year was agentic AI. So agentic AI is no longer just a cool idea.

14:17Major banks and FinTech firms are increasingly rolling out live systems. For example, Lloyd's Banking Group has announced a plan to deploy an agentic AI financial assistant across 21 million of its customer accounts in early 2026. Use cases now cover a broad spectrum from onboarding in KYC, AML compliance to fraud detection, loan processing, payments and customer support. Agentic agents can scan documents, flag suspicious activity, speed up credit or loan approvals and automate repetitive tasks, saving time and reducing error. Many banks have historically operated on slow legacy technology. Identic AI is seen as the lever to accelerate modernization.

14:58David, coming to you, you even mentioned Identic AI as one of your standout moments for the year with the interview with Stathis. Tell us more about this. This is kind of moving from, I know we've called this our buzzword, but it is really moving from hype to real-world deployment, right? Yeah, gosh, there's so much here. I mean, how much time do we have? like six and a half minutes okay right off we go i i think we need to draw distinctions between different different types here i mean buzzwords are often there that everybody kind of rallies around and everybody moves towards right but i think the truth is that agentic ai decomposes into quite a few different different things right so there's generative ai and there are some aspects of generative ai that are agentic in nature in in the sense that you know you can ask it to go and do a thing it'll go and do that in cooperation with various other various other systems and and And yes, as you're saying, Lloyd's Banking Group, but also on the podcast that we had last week, we were talking about Mistral, which is another AI service working with HSBC.

15:57So you are seeing a lot of banks now start to take this seriously. But what they are doing, as you said in the intro, is they're looking at those back office functions, those back office functions which have predictable enough repetitive patterns that an AI system can quite reliably do something with. And on the customer side, what LBG are doing, you know, the financial assistant, that's all insights. So what we're seeing is LBG, Starling is another one, they launched, I think it's called Starling Intelligence, you know, where you can go in and you can ask it a question and query, you know, how much did I spend at Starbucks last year or whatever, and it'll do that.

16:35So they are exploring it, which is great. They're taking very, very slow measured steps around how they deploy it. Because also I think the other thing about agentic AI is in order to get it right, it requires that culture change also within the business. It requires the other capabilities that banks have. Their data has to be. It's that classic one like junk data in, junk data out. This is the thing actually that Stathis mentioned that I think was so important in the spotlight video I mentioned, is that at the end of the day, generative AI is engineering, right? It is a capability. It is a component that sits in your stack.

17:16You cannot AI out of a problem yet, right? Not yet. I mean, the idea is that we get to AGI and ASI, but that's a rabbit hole. so it's all about engineering in the back end and identifying those use cases that are going to minimize risk and maximize the benefit to the business so yes it is interesting yeah definitely but also it is it's kind of in that hybrid I guess it's still in the hype cycle you know working on this show like our podcast inbox constantly delused with press releases that have AI in there somewhere and increasingly like agentic AI But yeah, as you say, it's sort of baby steps at this point to get it right, I guess, because it's such a big undertaking if you get it wrong, I suppose.

18:05Yeah, there's caution on the use cases, but there's also caution on the, shall we say, modality, right? So Mistral is an example of maybe a slightly different approach to Gemini or OpenAI or anything like that. that they are open source models that a bank can own, grounded in their own data and use their own compute power as they want. That's very, very different to something like Gemini, for example, which is a cloud-hosted situation which has various different risks associated with it. So there's just an enormous amount that financial institutions need to think about. It's not just the use case.

18:41It's about the architecture and what happens to your data and the risk that you take off the back of it. But what is amazing is that pretty much everybody is now looking into this and trying to figure out how to make it work. Definitely. Hence, it's a buzzword, right? Because everyone's kind of looking into it. And a lot of the press releases are like, literally that, we're looking into it. Yes, yes, yes. And so we're always sort of waiting for those kind of real use cases to be spat out sort of slowly, as you said. Joe, bringing you in, what does that kind of mean from the customer experience?

19:10Like David's talked about how that's going to shape the sort of back end, the sort of, you know, the grunt work, if you like. How much should a customer be aware of this? I think that it's good that people are being cautious in delivering these kind of features so far because we know how much AIs can hallucinate and go wild. And so I think at this point, there still needs anything to do with making payments, for example. I think it still needs to be partially agentic. I think it needs to be signed off because the stakes are too high and the error rate is too high on things that we're saying and where we are right now with AI.

19:51So I think caution should be taken on both the build and on the customer side. Yeah, I would say that a lot of the most experimental stuff we've actually seen individuals do. They might have even vibe coded it if you want to combine two where people have built up their own models that will, say, buy stocks on their behalf based on some criteria that they've built out and there's been some success stories there. Obviously, institutions can't do that to the same extent yet because of the associated risks. So I think, yeah, probably the biggest moves and shakers will actually be people taking on personal risk rather than institutions.

20:28But for the time being, I think we're probably quite away from seeing end-to-end agentic AI in that sense. I just want to build on that point because that's also come up in the podcast a few times. And there is a specific stat. There is an overwhelming amount of people who are using ChatGPT for their personal finances. It's a huge, it's a double-digit percentage where you've got people literally uploading transactions and saying, what stock should I be investing in? And you're right, I think that it's almost as if the individuals, the people are leading the market and financial institutions will have to figure out how to get there in a kind of a regulated way.

21:05Yeah, which is interesting because it's like, you know, how do you sort of, it comes off of like, how do you communicate like that a brand is using Agentic AI to their customers and like, to your point, it's almost going to be an expectation that they are using it, the customer's already ahead of them. So as you say, it's just about aligning the regulation and the practicalities of it to make sure it actually works in the back end without having a hallucination and creating a huge amount of risk. But yeah, I don't think we could have chosen anything else as our buzzword for the year. And I really enjoy how excited you are by the whole wide world of authentic AI.

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22:53Welcome back to Fintech Insider Insights, where we're taking a look back at some of the key moments from Fintech that got us talking this year. Let's get back into our next category, which is the partnership you didn't see coming. In this section, we're spotlighting the collaboration that made everyone do a double take. This is Fintech's odd couple that actually made magic happen. The partnership plot twist nobody predicted, but everyone talked about. This definitely got the team chatting here at 11FS, and some notable mentions go to Monzo, move its investments over to Sekel. Not FNZ, not one of the big globals like SS &C, but Sekel, a UK high-growth company.

23:27Also worth mentioning the FCA-NVIDIA AI Sandbox partnership, which is equally a real innovation supercharger. But the one that really took us by surprise is that Klarna launched its USD stablecoin with Stripe. I did promise that we would talk about stablecoins, so here we go. The Swedish digital bank and payments provider unveiled Klarna USD, marking its entry into stablecoins and crypto-enabled payments. Built on Stripe's new payments blockchain, Klarna USD is issued via Stripe's bridge stablecoin infrastructure on the new layer one blockchain Tempo, making Klarna the first bank to issue a token on Tempo.

24:04This was particularly surprising as Klarna CEO Sebastian Simakowski has publicly criticized crypto as potentially risky and volatile, noting that careful regulation and oversight are essential, even as the company experiments with digital currency. So, a lot in there. But I think our last point is particularly notable, that they've kind of done a U-turn on their position on crypto, which maybe is a response to the kind of wider market changes. but David Klana has had a huge year including an IPO that was it was happening and then it wasn't happening and it was happening again do you think this is related to that?

24:44You know the IPO sort of went okay but it looks like they're equally trying to sort of diversify all the same Yeah I mean they want to become a bank like a full service bank and it's interesting because if you look at how all of the big players are viewing it they're all coming at it from different angles, right? So Klana's angle is we started off as BNPL and then we became a one-stop shop for shopping. So let's just widen our moat and get people to consume via Klana. And then the final part of that is a full-service bank that also includes the merchant side, which is where Stablecoin, I think, begins to come in.

25:20So maybe what we need to do also is like decompose a little bit what Stablecoin actually means for Klana. So, you know, as we were saying, like we've had stable coin has come up all sorts of times on the podcast over over the last year but but essentially clana is a they have to settle money to the merchants who are using the clana button so if you think about it you know customer pays with clana at some point that money has to make its way to the merchant right and so clana are managing that treasury they have to slosh a lot of currency all around the world so that they can get that currency settled to the merchants in a timely manner.

26:01Now, Klarna, like a lot of other, you know, businesses will be using the current legacy rails to move USD around the world. So they'll be using Swift and Swift takes time and it costs money. So the use of this stable coin at the moment is for their treasury function. So it's, you know, let's significantly reduce the time that it's going to take for us to settle money to our merchants as an internal function. But then maybe what they can then do with that at some point in the future is that start to offer those out to some of their some of their merchants. So there's just stablecoin has all sorts of uses both for the internal organization, but also for like, for their for their end customers.