1066. News: OpenAI enters finance, Revolut pushes into wealth, and Primer raises $100m

28:23And if you want to use something, it's something that we own and that we've built, right? And I think, you know, when you do that, the risk is that the user won't have choice. They will eventually like, you know, be unsure if this is the right service for them because they can compare. And I think this is eventually like, you know, becoming a risk. Slick interface is great, but choice and interoperability is another critical constituent when you want to do that. So I think this is something that is going to be very interesting in the years to come. Yeah, and I think it's a really interesting moment in the sense of when I've looked at the classic super apps in the past, I think, again, maybe it's my Western brain, but the thing I've always struggled with has been the interface.

29:06You open up some of these WeChat platforms and you just say, oh my God, where do I even start? Like there are so many, so many parts of this experience. And I've always found it very overwhelming. And I've always thought that maybe in Western markets, you know, I struggle sometimes now in the Revolut app trying to find things just within the app as it currently stands. And, you know, I'm sure they put a lot of work into their UX, their information architecture and all that stuff. And it's still just really bloody hard. Like when you are serving so many different things, like how a customer can find and discover services in the right moment, in the right context is really hard.

29:35But again, with the emergence of AI, again, could that make super apps in Western context more possible than they have been in the recent past? Because maybe in the future, you don't have to be able to find the right part of the app. You just have to be able to go into the interface and request something or ask for something. And it's able to prompt you. I don't know. What do you think, Gab? Yeah, I think naturally, like the evolution of like some of these products will be like, you know, you have an interface to which you can communicate in natural language, right? I want to do this. What do you recommend I do?

30:08And like, I think generally speaking, like more and more of these services will become a lot more customized and tailored to the end user, right? You know, relevance when it comes to like payments, finance and all that, like, you know, exposing the things that matters to you at the end user, like, you know, is where like, you know, things are trending. I think, you know, we need to be careful of like, you know, using our brain and looking at other like apps in other markets because there's a very, there's a huge like cultural component here, right? I mean, some of the apps you've mentioned haven't been done for, you know, us like here in London or the US, right?

30:48And vice versa, right? So, and I think, you know, as you're like living and breathing a culture in some of these markets, like you start to understand like how these apps have been like, you know, built. I lived in South Korea for a short time. You know, like you, when I opened the Kakao app first, I was like, what's going on? And then as you sort of like understand how like the economy functions and how like things, you know, work in the market, then it starts to make more sense. But with AI, like customization will become like key for some of these apps. And that's something that I'm sure like, you know, Revolut and some others are like starting to embed into their product.

31:23And I think we've, user interfaces used to be very, very structured, right? They used to be fixed. They used to be the same for everyone. And I think then we started to make stuff a bit more persona-based. And then we suddenly have gone to the other end of the spectrum where it's just like you have an empty page with a chat and then you just speak to it. And I think the truth of where UI is going is probably a bit of both, right? To Gab's point, it needs to be flexible. It needs to be customizable. So I think if you just have chat, then it's really hard to sort of have that at a glance thing or have workflows or it to be proactively suggesting and bringing things up to you.

32:04So I think what we'll start to see is almost these UIs that are a bit more dynamic, where it's a case of, you know, you're almost building your own digital banking app experience. And it's not a case of you're dropping widgets in and out. It's a case of you've just set up a budget for coffee spend or whatever, and then it's going to go and give you a little like icon and a chart for that at the top of your screen. when you're going to check, but only in certain conditions and so on and so forth. So I think that's kind of dynamic UI that is almost being built. So that mixture of the structure and the flexibility is probably the direction of travel.

32:38But I'll be honest, I haven't really seen anyone do that really well yet. I think people right now are still very much in persona-based structures or chat. So yeah, I'm excited to see where that convergence happens. Yeah, absolutely. Hannah, I suppose closing word to you on this one. A lot of people maybe assume it's not possible to serve like retail customers and high net worth individuals that you have to pick one or pick one or the other. What's your take? Oh, God, what a question. I mean, I mean, honestly, I would kind of have to agree with that. I mean, of course, you could offer a high net worth individual exactly the same service that you're offering a retail investor.

33:21And, you know, I'm sure there'd be many that would go for it. I'm sure there's many sort of like skeptics out there who think that, you know, this is a better solution for them and fine. But I still think for people who are serious, like really serious about their money, I still think that they would prefer a face-to-face interaction. I actually have a statistic on this. Let me find it. Just 10 % of people would actually feel comfortable giving their financial data over to kind of a bot or an AI service. But by contrast, when it's a human, then 50 % of people actually want the financial advisor to take all of their data and do something with it.

34:03And to me, that tells us that, to me, what that tells me is that people don't actually want to have a robot doing their finances for them or doing like their payments for them or whatever. They do actually want to have a person. We are supposed to be sociable and we are supposed to talk to each other. But because that's so out of reach for people and it's become so inconvenient, then this has stepped in its place. And I think that if you had the choice, you would still like to have somebody there, like that reassurance of the person. And this week I was writing for FT's The Banker about the resurgence of credit unions.

34:36People are so hungry for a friendly face on their high street, they're actually coming back. So, yeah, that's what I think. I think you can give the same service to both, but what people really want deep down is to feel cared for. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to see how Revolut attempt to approach that challenge. Okay, on that note, we're just going to take a very quick pause here. We'll be back shortly.

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35:44Before we get back to the news, we wanted to tell you about an event we're hosting next month. We're teaming up with Paymentology for a special open mic night all about the next era of payments. It's happening on Wednesday the 24th of June at the Joiner on Worship Street in London from 6pm with free food, drinks and plenty of fintech folks in the room. Why would you miss it? If you fancy joining the conversation and maybe even grabbing the mic yourself, head to the link in the show notes and save your spot. Okay, our final main story this week is Primer has announced a$100 million Series C funding round led by Safina with participation from Peak 15 Partners and continued backing from existing investors including Accel, Borderton, Iconique, Tencent and Speedinvest.

36:27Primer says the funding will support the next phase of its platform development particularly around AI-powered payments orchestration and autonomous optimization tools. The company argues that while AI is becoming central to payments and commerce, most businesses still operate across fragmented processes, fraud tools and acquirers, creating incomplete data environments that limit the effectiveness of AI systems. Primer's platform sits across the entire payments lifecycle from checkout to payouts, capturing more than 400 data points per transaction and managing the majority of payment flows for enterprise merchants.

37:00Gab, it would be a bit weird if I didn't come to you first on this one. I mean, first and foremost, congratulations on the raise. That's a pretty chunky, pretty chunky milestone. Congrats to you and the team. Maybe tell us a bit about the journey so far. Yeah, I mean, like huge congrats to the Prime Egos. That's, you know, how we call ourselves at Primer. Yeah, we've been like, you know, working hard over the last like, you know, like six years on sort of reinventing how companies are managing their payment stack, right? Fundamentally, the reason why we started Primer back in the days is because we've realized that, you know, companies out there were looking to use, like, many, many services across the payment lifecycle, right, and across the payment stack.

37:41And they had that sort of growing roadmap, and we thought, okay, like, we're going to have to solve that roadmap. So what if we could actually give you a complete unified open infrastructure that is agnostic, that allows you to connect to all those different services? So as you start doing that, you allow, like, you know, companies, going back to my point of, like, you know, open, openness, interoperability, to just like use the best services for them, right? You're not imposing services to them, you're saying like, hey, you have this unified framework, you have this unified infrastructure, now you can connect to whatever is best for your business, right?

38:15And as you do that, you start having a complete picture of like the entirety of the payment lifecycle, right? From like, you know, checkout to payout, as you said. And as we were, you know, doing that, you know, what we've achieved is that when someone uses Primer, they're sending us like, you know, near to 100 % of all their payments, which is actually very unique because most companies out there have like a very, very limited view of someone else's payments or some merchant payments, right? They have like, you know, what we call share of platform of 30, 50 % and then like, you know, someone else has like the rest and someone else and someone else right we as primer have like a complete picture um which you know has allowed us to provide transparency uh to provide uh like a very clear understanding of like the cost structure the performance and so on and so forth and we've always been like you know working hard and making sure that that data can actually actually be actionable which is essentially like you know what we're doing now with our agent which essentially like sits within your primer dashboard can actually make sense of the data because we have one knowledge and context and provide you like the ability to be extremely sophisticated on how you're going to be optimizing for performance how you're going to be optimizing for like you know usage of some services um and ultimately like helping you improve like you know uh yeah like any aspects of your business which is related to payments but yeah it's uh it's a testament to the hard work from like from the entire team and uh and working extremely closely with our customers as well yeah no i mean it's a phenomenal achievement I guess that was what I was really keen to understand.

39:57What are some of the practical benefits? So when you have that unified view, what are some of the practical ways that you can help merchants? I mean, again, just for our listeners to understand, like in terms of the advice or guidance that your agents are able to give them, like what types of things are you moving the dial on for your customers? Well, first of all, like if you take a step back, think about it. If you don't have a unified view, it's very hard to make sense of things, right? How are you supposed to make sense of things if you have to log in into like, seven different dashboards, eventually create something custom, which will have just part of the context.

40:34And so what Primer is doing is saying, okay, you can now have a centralized view of every single aspects of the payment lifecycle with one single interface. When you have that, you can start making sense of, okay, what's going on? And if you embed like some intelligence now onto the product, what Primer Companion will do is it will actually like supplement the analysis that you're doing, right? And you have essentially like almost like an army of analysts sitting within your dashboard right now, which have context of your payments, right? Because again, if Primer would only have like 30 % of someone else's payments, I would say like here, I would not be afraid to say that it would be completely irrelevant, right?

41:22Because again, it goes back to what we said at the beginning of this podcast. If you don't have full context, how can you give proper advice? But we have, again, close to 100 % of our merchant payments. And so when you have that, when you have the context, when you have the knowledge, then you can do extremely sophisticated analysis for your customer, telling them how a market is behaving for them when it comes to payments, like the services they could eventually use to optimize for performance, like the cost structure they can start, like, you know, understand better and optimize. And that's something that, you know, we're extremely excited to sort of further develop.

42:05And the moment we actually launched Primer Companion, the adoption has been phenomenal. Like we see, like, it's a very natural evolution on how you can use and should use Primer. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's really helpful to understand. Michael, how much does what Gab's described in terms of the fragmentation of this payments ecosystem, how much does that resonate with what you're hearing? Yeah, firstly, Gab, congrats on the raise. I couldn't agree more. I think no matter what space you work in, the first thing you want to try and do is get a complete set of data and see everything. If you're doing cash flow underwriting, if you are the merchant, if you are the bank, etc., you want to get all of the data you can about a customer of a merchant's payments.

42:48And once you've got all of that data together, most data is garbage in probably any sector. But in financial services, I think it's very rare to see data together. And if it is together, it's kind of useless. So taking that data and then turning that into something structured, something useful, and doing that at different layers. Because if you just try and give a whole load of garbage data to an AI that isn't specialized on that type of data and it doesn't really get it, it's going to infer things and it's going to summarize things. But it's not explainable. It's hard to understand how it got there.

43:28You've just given a whole bunch of transactions about a customer and said, this person's a gambler. Well, why do you think they're a gambler? So doing that at every single level, like generally improves the results that you're going to get at that top level so that you can do draw really, you can create solid hypotheses, you can draw really valid conclusions, but also you can understand how it got to those conclusions because it's still not going to be right 100 % of the time. and sometimes there's a human in the loop or you need to be able to explain that for regulatory purposes. Cash flow underwriting is a great example of that.

44:05So yeah, I think in this AI world, the number one thing for any business I think is focusing on is how do I get all the data and then how do I clean up that data, make it rich so I can deliver all that extra insight, not just throwing AI on top of it, which I think was maybe how some people started when AI was a bit newer. And I think now we're becoming more mature in how we kind of deal with that life cycle through the stages. Yeah. Hannah, what was your take on this story? Well, I don't feel like I can have much of a take because it's Gab's story. I suppose my question to Gab's would be, how did you celebrate?

44:43And I guess my other question to you actually is with data, data is like really messy in terms of the environmental impact and in terms of, you know, like people's privacy. Do you think about that? Like, what are you doing to help protect the planet with all of this data? Tell me. Yeah, I mean, like, there's a lot of consideration, like, obviously, when it comes to that. And this probably, like, required, like, another podcast, like, entirely to, you know, look at how we're taking that into consideration. I think we as Primer, like, obviously, like, one, we're regulated. Like, we need to be, you know, we are, like, the infrastructure for our customer, right?

45:20So there's a lot about, you know, security, reliability, resiliency, and all that. But yeah, we obviously like, you know, hyper transparent on how like this data is being used. Again, going back to the point earlier, like, you know, okay, you give me like some advice, you're doing some analysis, like, where is that coming from? Like, what was the source? Like, what are you using? Like, you know, tell me, tell me more. And that's something that, you know, we are extremely diligent in doing and investing. And on the celebration piece, like, yeah, I've been on the road a lot. So I haven't had a chance to celebrate yet, but the team is celebrating.

45:53The planet is certainly like something and we have investors. Yeah, for sure. Like these are things that we're looking at as well and it's relevant and everyone should look at it. And so, yeah, happy to expand on that. Like, you know, we have a big miss. If we were in an interview, I would push that. Tell me, how did you? As you should, as you should, as you should. And how did you celebrate, sorry? I haven't had much time to celebrate yet. So something I'm sure we'll do with the team. I've been on the road a lot Hannah so yeah Is that why you're going at 5pm to crack a champagne? No I'm actually going to be in a plane tonight so yeah It's in the morning right now I'm in New York so yeah it's still early in the day Really joy No rest no rest at all I mean I guess yeah just to close out this one what are the next big goals for Prime obviously this is a significant raise I'm sure you've got a lot of ambitious plans for these funds Yeah well like you know we will like you know continue to invest in that aspect of the product, again, because of the unique positioning that we have and the context that we have and the usage that we are seeing across our platform.

46:56Again, this like, you know, 95 plus, like, you know, share of payments going through Primer for our customer, the 400 liter points, the adoption that we see, and naturally the next evolution is, all right, we're giving you recommendations, we're giving you insights, like how much can we act on those insights in a context that is actually being controlled by our customer, right? There's guardrails that you can put in place. There's a level of like, you know, autonomy you want to give to the agent. So that's something that we're looking at. The U.S. is a big market for us. We've been growing a lot over there.

47:26That's why I'm here right now. And yeah, it's certainly like a market where we want to continue to push where we're seeing a lot of traction. And the thing that we've been investing a lot over the past couple of years as well is we've been solving for the first part of the journey, like when, you know, for payments team and to help like optimize payments. But what we've been like doing a lot over the last couple of years is to also solve for the second part of the journey. So we talk about like money movement broadly and we essentially like, you know, Primar is becoming the platform that helps businesses optimize the way like money moves across their business.

47:58So we've been working to help like finance and treasury team. But, you know, fundamentally, if you start using many services, then you have a lot of reports, a lot of data everywhere. How do you make sense of that? How do you sort of optimize for reconciliation? How do you optimize for like, you know, cost insights? How do you optimize for FX exposure? All these things like, you know, have been very much top of mind for us. And so we're investing a lot in this sort of second part of the journey and embedding AI across like all aspects of the product. So yeah, we are busy at Primer. The Primeigos are working very, very hard and, you know, always like pushing hard for our customer and the partners.

48:33The one thing I would add is we've been doing all that while keeping Primer completely open and interpretable. We're not the one dictating what should be used. if a customer say, I want to use that provider, I want to use my own system within Primer, well, they should be able to do that, right? So last year, we launched a product called Primer for Partner, allowing anyone to be on Primer. It's a no-code interface. We're very much exporting no-code. And anyone with very technical knowledge can actually have their product sitting on Primer so that it's available to our user. So, yeah, exciting road ahead of us.

49:08And yeah, congrats to all the Prime Eagles for this round. Absolutely phenomenal achievement. Okay, on that note, we're going to take a very quick pause here. We'll be back shortly.

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49:53Okay, now for a quick look at a story we don't have time to cover in full, but still deserves a shout out. We took this one from Fonextra, and that is Nationwide gives abuse survivors the power to block harmful payment messages. Nationwide has launched a new in-app feature allowing abuse survivors to hide harmful payment references sent through bank transfers. The feature is designed to tackle a form of economic abuse where perpetrators use payment references and repeated low-value transfers to maintain unwanted contact, intimidation or control. The launch follows the introduction earlier this year of a new three-stage warning process under the Faster Payments framework aimed at helping banks identify and address abusive payment messaging.

50:31Nationwide says its approach goes further by introducing a formal escalation process that can ultimately lead to perpetrators having their accounts closed. According to the Building Society, early evidence suggests the system is already having an impact with abusive behaviour stopping after the first warning letter in reported cases. The feature was developed in partnership with survivors and domestic abuse charity Surviving Economic Abuse, which says banking tools have too often been exploited as a channel for coercive control. It's obviously really great to see Nationwide implementing this. Obviously very sad and distressing that they had to implement this.

51:06Starling Bank rolled out some of the controls in 2023 so kudos to them as well but maybe now that Nationwide have taken this step we'll see this getting copy and pasted across the wider industry and obviously really great to see that some of these new initiatives as well around issuing letters maybe are starting to cut off this behaviour before it can build up momentum we rightly spend a lot of our time celebrating new products and services that make life easier for customers but stories like this are an important reminder that there are bad actors across financial services, and if we can use technology to make their lives harder, then that is just as worthy of celebration.

51:42Okay, now time for our and finally story. Apparently, even being the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics isn't enough to get through modern fraud controls. Pope Leo's bank in the US hung up on him as they thought it was a prank call. This was a day from the Independent, but quite a few people got excited about it. Pope Leo XIV, I believe, gosh, Roman numerals in this show is catching me out. Formerly, Robert Provost from Chicago recently tried calling his US bank to update his address and phone number after moving into his new accommodation, the Vatican. Unfortunately, the bank teller remained deeply unconvinced.

52:16Things escalated further when the Pope's brother reportedly explained, you're speaking with the Pope, to which the employee allegedly responded, oh really? And hung up. My first reaction to this was, sorry, this is a terrible pun, so I appreciate, I apologize in advance. that I think this is a really great example of some cisternatic issues with customer verification. Is that too awful? Should we ask you? I don't get it. Cisternatic. The cisternatic chapel? Oh, no. I'm sorry. I got it. Sorry. I know. I told you it was bad. That's great. I told you it was bad. On the subject of bad, what's the most convincing or funny prank call you've ever had, Gab?

53:02You know what? like I used that functionality, like started to recently use it, where like, you know, your Apple device can actually like ask someone to sort of like, I can't, I can sort of, I don't know the name of it. You can see who's calling you, right? And you can like accept or reject the call. So yeah, I can't remember of anything I had like, yeah, any prank call or anything. Yeah, I don't have anything top of mind right now. I'm trying to avoid answering like, yeah. does anyone answer the phone anymore to like unknown numbers I don't I feel like I get five of those a day and I just I just I just don't answer the phone anymore unless it has a name on it if I need work I'm like whoever you are it doesn't matter if they're a spam I'm like do you want me to write for you yeah it's going to be an extreme lady though like this so as you said Michael like the amount of like you know calls you receive like on a single day is pretty insane so yeah yeah I mean do you Are you sympathetic with the bank employee?

54:04Do you think they did the right thing, Michael? I mean, if someone, like what are the chances, right? Like one in seven billion. So I am sympathetic that they didn't think it was actually the Pope on the phone. On the other hand, wouldn't it be really great if their internal banking system had already figured out that maybe this person was the Pope and that maybe they'd already moved to Rome and that it made sense that actually, oh, this person is calling me from Rome. I can see they've had a few credit card transactions there recently as well. Maybe it's, you know, flagged certain things about them in the past.

54:44So, honestly, I think the failure here is probably that the bank system wasn't smart enough to anticipate that this is a potential scenario in that situation. It wasn't one in seven billion, though, because he is a client of that bank. So there's no way that client has seven billion customers, right? We'd have heard about him that. So he's on the books of that bank. So that bank should definitely be aware that the Pope is one of their clients and should be aware that this kind of thing could come up. I worked in banking in Switzerland. Even though you have banking secrecy, we all kind of knew that there were princes and princesses and like we all knew how to behave properly.

55:28So I don't know. I don't think that that's any excuse. And also my mom is like the biggest Catholic in the world. It's kind of wild. And she would have got him like that. So I think you could do a quick quiz. I would say patron saint of lost things because it's St. Jude because my mom always praised St. Jude for me because I always lose my things. And I could just ask him like a few questions and then we'd be away. Or ask him to speak in Latin. I think this was him calling to say that he was now the Pope though, right? I think this was just after he'd become the Pope. So maybe the KYC, PEP sanctions, etc.

56:02checks hadn't quite caught up to that particular job change. I don't know what you would call that in a core banking system. I think they should have been a while. They should have been a while. It goes back to the concept of proactive versus reactive, right? I mean, I think if systems are proactive and actually understand things from their customer, then essentially this is a non-issue, right? But I think in that case, like they were reactive to things, which is pretty wild if you think about it, right? Like, you know, and yeah, I'm very much blind with Michael here. Like, yeah, I mean, it's maybe system where disjointed and things like that.

56:43And, you know, you call, you say you're the poke, maybe like, I guess the reaction is sure. But as Anna said, a few questions and maybe you can like, you know, ensure that this is true. but yeah. Yeah, I mean, I feel like if this is all actually accurate, which I really hope it is because it's very funny, I assume the employee in question is probably feeling a little bit silly. I mean, because apparently he also gave a social security number, explained that he was in Rome and they still asked him to come into the branch. So yeah, it probably just sounds like it wasn't the best day for that individual and for the bank as a whole.

57:17But hey, we all have bad days. Okay, on that optimistic note, Thank you so much to today's guests. Where can people find out a bit more about you and your companies, Gab? Primer.io. This is the best place to find out about Primer or on LinkedIn. Awesome. Hannah? Okay, www.hdinvestmentcontent.com. And if you want someone to write your opinion pieces or your thought leadership or anything like that, please think of me. Awesome. And last but not least, Michael? thisisbud.com or just bud.ai if you want the classy modern.ai doing. Awesome. And you can also find me on LinkedIn, Kate Moody or katellenfest.com.

57:59That wraps up today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, please make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform of choice. And if you really like what you've heard, why not share the podcast with a colleague or a friend? As always, if you want to join the conversation, find us on social media, just Search for 11FS or Fintech Inside or email podcast at 11FS.com. Thanks again. Goodbye.

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