This is a point I will return to more over time. All this “customer development” (that is otherwise an essential part of the startup journey) is pretty irrelevant if you have known a market, its players, its problems and upcoming changes for 20yrs… Of course you always need to listen to your clients – like all businesses – but on the other hand if you don’t know 90%++ of what your product needs from the get-go you were asleep for two decades. Again it’s the implicit “lift” lock, stock and barrel of a Silicon Valley (perhaps more retail) model that can be an issue. The second important element of deep experience is (in this specific case of R5 but also generically) Jon knows the market. This complexity and regulation is something that needs to be understood whether you are a “T-shirt” or a “suit”. Some Fintech can be innovated “from the outside” but much Fintech – like most (all?) mature, regulated industries – is highly complex and highly regulated. This is especially valuable in a frothy/early-stage London Fintech world where incubators/accelerators/the-media can sometimes portray an implicit assumption that FS is “easy” such that it can be innovated by the archetypal “teenager on a couch” (hence all the bean bags, ping-pong tables etc). The Importance of Experience and Domain Expertise in Fintech Very tough to be creative if you wear blinkers. Indeed it is no surprise that the most creative folks do have the widest horizons. Having lunch with him recently I was reminded of the City in the ‘80s – when everyone had something interesting to say outside of Financial Services as well as within it. So he brings great practical experience to the show.Īdditionally Jon is a top bloke. R5 is leading that change by creating an electronic trading platform for emerging market currencies which is focused on moving the market from voice to screen.Ībove and beyond this current incarnation, Jon is an excellent person to discuss innovation, FS, FX and Fintech with as he has 20yrs experience in FX markets and is a serial entrepreneur having worked, in essence, with Fintechs before “Fintechs” existed as such. In essence this is to increase transparency in a market which has around $100bn turnover every day. Wearing his day job hat, upcoming regulation requires Foreign Exchange trading banks to radically change their current trading channels for emerging markets. On this show today I am delighted to welcome a serial FX entrepreneuer – Jon Vollemaere CEO of (which is all very synchronicitous as this is episode 005 :-)) – to discuss all of these issues. Also what’s happening with emerging market currencies and the London Fintech scene as a whole? The importance of domain expertise and experience is (often) misunderstood. Investing in exclusively bleeding-edge companies is difficult in some industries because many of them offer mature products by the time they are ready to go public.īleeding edge describes a product or service that is ahead of its time and potentially game-changing, but may not yet function properly or ever generate sufficient demand in the marketplace to achieve mainstream success.There are some huge misunderstandings in the Fintech scene right now.Businesses that purchase bleeding edge technologies get a first-mover advantage if the technology later becomes mainstream, but they also face the risk of sinking money into something doomed for failure.These types of goods are generally released to the public early to help companies smooth out any kinks, problems, and any other issues that go unobserved when the technology is originally made.Bleeding edge is mainly defined as newer, more extreme, and riskier than technologies on the cutting or leading edge.Bleeding edge refers to a product or service that is new, experimental, generally untested, and carries a high degree of uncertainty.
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