Dancing between the feet of elephants: Where can you start a venture-scale fintech today?

Is the UK the best place to scale a venture-backed fintech?

Fintech is the biggest sub-sector in UK tech, making up nearly 30% of the total enterprise value of UK tech according to Dealroom.co. But is the UK the best place to scale a new fintech?

For our final panel at our recent Fintech Showcase, we brought together Tamara Harel-Cohen, co-founder of RiseUp, which is making it easy for anyone to achieve financial wellbeing, Tingting Peng, Chief Transformation Officer at Moove, the world’s first mobility fintech, Portman Wills co-founder at Wagestream, a financial wellbeing platform for frontline workers, and Samir Desai, former founder of Funding Circle and founder of Super Payments, which is powering free payments for businesses.

Here’s what they discussed:

Think about the infrastructure you need: Wagestream helps frontline workers manage, save and access their earnings with ease. The company must be able to offer instant payments to serve this customer base. Whilst other countries like India and Brazil are catching up, the UK had an early lead on quick, seamless instant bank-to-bank payments which Wagestream needs to be successful.

Look where you can scale first: The US will always be the big goal for the majority of tech companies but for Superpayments, it was important to build and scale in a market the founder knew well, before spending a lot of money on trying to break through into the US’s more competitive market. 

Matching the customer need: Moove’s accessible financing product for mobility entrepreneurs working for platforms like Uber is available across Sub-Saharan Africa. Expanding to the UK made sense because there is a significant immigrant population amongst mobility drivers that are underbanked and ignored by traditional financial institutions, just like its customers in countries like Nigeria and Ghana.

Impact leads to talent: On the surface, fintech may not seem like an impact industry but companies like Funding Circle helped to create 100,000 jobs every year through its loans and it became the largest lender during Covid. Being able to point to tangible societal impact helps to attract the right talent: startups aren’t easy to build and you need very motivated teams to get through the highs and lows. 

There’s always a white space: It can sometimes feel like there is a fintech for everything, but that is far from the case. Consultants BCG found that fintech has a 2% share of the $12.5TRN global financial services revenues. There is always going to be an opportunity to solve the problems of banks and incumbents.

Second-time founder advantages: When Samir first founded Funding Circle in 2010, there wasn’t the same ecosystem or software tools as there are now. The pace at which you can reach investors, and build and ship products is much faster, not to mention that there is more experienced talent around which ultimately makes it easier to build a company that will scale. 

Watch the highlights video to find out more: