Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Welcome back to Breaking Banks. I’m in London this week and I caught up with Ali Patterson. Ali.

Ahoy, Brett. This is weird for me. Welcome back.

It’s the other way around usually. Now, it’s you. I know.

I know. You’ve been interviewing me for years. I have interviewed you once before, as you recalled earlier in our conversation.

And thank you for wearing the Provoke.fm t-shirt, by the way. This is- It’s faded a bit, but it’s still recognizable. 2018 vintage.

Was that London, right? Was it London Cybus? Or where was that though? We gave you the t-shirt. Cybus. Sydney.

Sydney, yes. Correct. Correct.

And that’s generally where we meet, is we meet at events. But I wanted to talk about, you know, you’ve now been part of the architecture or the furniture of fintech over the last few years from a reporting, well, over the last decade from a reporting perspective. I think we met at Finovate London for the first time.

Where was it we met the first time? I’m going to embarrass myself because it was Cybus 2015, Singapore, and I was listening to Breaking Banks. And I saw you and I was a little bit, oh, for God’s sake, I was a little bit starstruck. Oh, really? And you were like, no, it’s all right.

It’s all right, dude. Don’t be starstruck. So yeah, that was, again, Cybus.

I mean, I get that a lot, but it’s interesting, you know, I mean, I don’t think of myself in that way. But, you know, obviously some people do because, you know, back in those early days, I had tons of exposure and stuff. But that is, that’s an opportunity, you know, for brand in terms of just giving people a good experience and making them feel comfortable, right? You know, so I’ve worked on that.

But you’ve been heavily involved in reporting on the fintech space. So let’s go back to the foundation of your business. Tell me about how you decided that you wanted to go into this space and sort of chronicle what was happening in fintech.

And tell me about how you put together your business in respect to that. There’s, oh, at the time, I ended up needing a job and I ended up working for what is now Global Data. And it was just a coincidence that I ended up on a magazine, which I think is still going called Future Banking.

And off the back of that, it was around 2012 to 2014. So it was just at the start of the likes of Monzo and Starling were kind of not quite there yet. I remember very clearly saying, looking at the likes of Tesco Banking, and these guys are now offering current accounts.

I think Tesco Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank, these supermarkets, they’ve already got the branch infrastructure. And it was at the time where people were using branches. And I then was looking at what Global Data was doing, I was thinking, I need more freedom to be able to do this, to do this better.

So start of 2015, I launched what’s now FF News. It was a Finnovate event that we actually launched, Finnovate London 2015, which was the Finnovate where the organizers famously stops people like Liz Lumley from playing buzzword bingo, because they were causing quite a ruckus about this. But that was great, because that was where Revolut, which had about three people at the time, that’s where Revolut pitched on stage at Finnovate.

And now Finnovate would be clambering to get Nick to get a keynote for them. Yeah, exactly. JP Nicholls loves buzzword bingo, by the way.

So shout out to JP. So FF News, you’ve been at all these different events around the place and so forth. But looking back over the last 10 years or so, for you personally, you just mentioned the Revolut.

But what are the moments you remember that now you look back on and go, boy, I was so lucky to be there at that moment to capture that? I interviewed Anne in what she told me was her first video press interview before Starling even was named. In fact, it was pre-Carrotback. And I kind of didn’t quite appreciate it at the time, but especially reading her book, I now go, this was all happening at the exact same time.

Did she mention that in the book? She said to journalists, is that me? Is that me? It’s like, yeah, I think that’s got to be me there. I’ll take credit that it’s me. I almost wish at the time I’d said, what can I do to help? Because it was like the absolute lowest of the low for her before rising like an absolute phoenix.

So I kind of wish that I helped there a fair bit. So I met her at Innovate Finance, I think it was in 2013. And she came rushing up to me and she was like, I love Bank 2.0. I’m starting a bank based on what you wrote in the book.

So that’s pretty cool. I’m not sure if she remembers that conversation, but yeah. Any other moments that stand out for you? Yeah, there’s a couple of really interesting ones that shouldn’t stand out, but they do.

There’s a few organizations that no longer exist. And I’m kind of fascinated by those. One of which is Loot.

OK. And I love Loot was Challenger Bank. I think it launched in 2015.

And it was specifically for students and the whole idea. Was that that young guy that- He was like 18. Yes, I remember that.

I remember that. It was a solid app. It was solving a solid problem because students in the UK, you get three big loan payments a year.

It was how to divide that up. I mean, I think he was quite young. And again, as an outsider, I look at it and go, you were naively screwed over by a very large bank.

But looking at that, that’s something that I almost want to, in six years after, basically with a statute of limitations and you can talk about it, I want to go, tell me everything about what happened. Because I’m fascinated by Loot. That was one of the organizations that I want to know more about.

I think he’s actually, you’ve interviewed him as well? Yes, yeah. The other big one that broke our sight a bit because we were quite on the front lines in terms of was Wirecard. I mean, we’re still pretty chatty with Pav, but Wirecard, when that happened, Wirecard were a sponsor of us.

They sponsored a bunch of stuff. And I look back at it now going, was that okay? Where did that money come from? But the whole Wirecard fiasco was so unexpected from when you, from how they presented themselves at so many events. So I mean, I’m, obviously we parallel each other in the media business.

You know, we’ve had, you know, Breaking Banks is now coming up on our, we’re just having our 11th anniversary this month, actually. So welcome to the 11th anniversary show, I guess. So it’s been a very interesting time.

We’ve seen massive investment in fintech. We’ve seen COVID, a very dynamic environment. But you know, when we look at traditional media organizations, a lot of them are really struggling.

And you know, the monetary model is really challenging because a lot of it’s gone to being based on influence of volume and things like this for the creator economy, you know, and for real news organizations as you’ve tried to create with FF News, you know, it’s become a challenge. So what’s been the secret sauce for you in terms of your longevity now, because you know, around 10 years of this, similar to Breaking Banks actually, you know, how have you got organizations interested in and invested in supporting FF News? I’m very stubborn. But in my previous employment at Global Data, I was involved heavily in sales.

And I think every entrepreneur has to be able to pick up the phone and be able to make stuff happen. When working at Global Data, my repeat rate, I know off the top of my head, because it’s one singular figure, which was zero. I didn’t repeat a single customer.

The problem I currently have at FF News now at the moment is the exact opposite. Almost all of our business is repeat business. I think part of the reason we’ve been quite resilient, and it is, you do have to look at sales.

I mean, Alt-Fi was phenomenal. They had some fantastic tracking, some great stories, but they focus so much on the stories that they didn’t actually think about, they didn’t think about the actual business model behind it as much. I mean, I don’t know some of the full behind the scenes, but that’s kind of an outsider’s view on it.

We go all out with looking after our clients, perfect case in point. And I can’t think of any other organization that would do this. And I’d love to see others do it.

We had a client, which was then Earthport. We wrote an article for them. It was going in a magazine.

It was at Money 2020. I had 3,000 copies with me in Amsterdam, and they said, we cannot have that article published because there was a quote from someone that they couldn’t have in it. What do you do in that situation? Do you pull the magazine, and then you’ve got other people who are unhappy? Or do you have Earthport unhappy? So I’m kind of going, what do I do in this instance here? I’ve got one client or the whole client.

You just tear out their article, I don’t know. We printed on stickers just their article. We didn’t have time to print the entire magazine, but we digitally printed their article.

And over about 12 hours overnight, myself and I hired a bunch of locals, I wish it was sticking it down. It was with a guillotine, cutting it perfectly, sticking it down over two different pages, and then sealing it shut. And we did that for 3,000 copies.

There’s a wonderful video on Twitter of us doing this. We took over the canteen at the Ibis Hotel, and we had a whole workflow. And we got this magazine article replaced for Money 2020.

That’s good lateral thinking. Similarly, we also had another for Cybers 2017. We had a client, and we had a front cover.

And we tried to do something different with the front cover, which was it was actually kind of trimmed. So as you pull it back, it’s a similar image, but it changes the image. And about two days before heading off to Toronto, or before all these things had to get shipped off to Toronto, me and my wife sat in the kitchen table with scissors, and again, the guillotine manually cutting this out.

So when I say I’m stubborn, I think I’m stubborn, but as an organization, we’re not afraid to just work really hard to get this stuff done, which I think any other organization would not really be committed to do. And it’s always nice when that then gets recognized by a client, because there’s some clients that, again, they’ve been clients since 2015. And so the problem is, we’re spending so much time dealing and delivering all our current clients that new business, we want to get that ratio up a bit.

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Learn more at AlloyLabs.com. Alloy Labs, banking unbound. Now, from a brand awareness perspective, things are very different today. You know, you used to have this sort of mass market approach, you know, with TV commercials and billboards and things like that.

And now it’s all about eyeballs, you know, with influences and so forth. But, you know, when we look at organizations, a lot of the organizations that are aligned or that you’ve had as supporters over the years, they still need tactical elements, you know. So often looking for things like lead generation and so forth.

But that’s harder to sort of it’s both easier and harder to quantify in this sort of digital space, because when you start at the top of the funnel, awareness is really important first off, and then you can get to stuff like webinars and things that generate leads. But do you have sort of a view on how that’s changed and how consumer behavior and recognition of brands is changing in the sort of digital environment with TikTok and everything and how you can be more tactical in that environment? TikTok is a perfect example. I do have very, very strong opinions on this.

It depends on the client. We have marketeers that literally just want sheer volume of eyeballs because that’s what they’re measured on. And that is easy to deliver that to them.

But I don’t want to do that. I want to deliver. I’d rather deliver a smaller amount that could actually convert to actual leads, even at the detriment of that person’s KPIs.

TikTok is a perfect example where it’s really easy to get tens of thousands of views. Taylor, who’s on my team, has been nagging me to launch a TikTok. We launched a TikTok and we’re getting sort of 15,000 views on them, on some of them.

What I’ve come to realize is absolutely key with TikTok is we don’t really know who those people are until you install TikTok on your phone and you have your phone synced with the CRM and then TikTok obviously minds that and then it will go. You have a relationship with these people here. So all of a sudden our content is basically we let TikTok do the work.

Our content is going to be shown to the individuals who are on our CRM. So it does become a lot more a lot more targeted because at the end of the day, I always say on YouTube, it is all about the CPM. Who cares if you have five million views, if your CPM is half a penny? Right.

I’d much rather have a CPM of $280 and have 5000 people view it because it’s a lot more targeted. It’s a lot more specific. And that’s why I think, especially in the fintech space, marketeers need to look at today.

The actual views is vanity and the actual CPM, the actual useful people watching it, that is sanity. When we look at the UK market, you know, it’s been a hotbed of fintech, particularly for challenger banks. You know, we’ve had a number of challenger banks be successful here, which is tricky in some other markets.

But, you know, when you look at the different markets, because you travel all over the world doing FF News all over, how would you categorize what makes a fintech get their traction early on? Having looked at the likes of Starling and Monzo and Revolut in the market here, is there a secret sauce or is it just a combination of luck and hard work? I was thinking about this exact thing earlier. I think a huge amount of it is in the name. If, for example, with yourself, Brett King, you type in King of fintech into Google, you pop up straight away because of the name.

Bonk in the Netherlands, perfect name. Monzo has the hot coral card and that became almost like its own meme around it. Starling, I think, was less.

Starling was slow and steady growth. Monzo was quite explosive. Well, they had their crowdfunding stuff as well, which I think was a driver in those early days.

It was more marketing than… Yeah, it was more marketing. Yeah, it worked. I mean, they marketed off that, right? Yeah.

And there were things like waiting lists. And to get further up, you need to refer further other people, which is kind of textbook now. But at the time, it was like, this is unheard of.

So I think timing plays a factor, but also the decisions of those minor things like the name and the, oh, it’s a hot coral card. That made such a difference at the time, which is kind of like being in a bottle in many ways. So, yeah, that’s why I think those organizations have done well.

Where I’m looking at at the moment, I think this is going to be an interesting arena, is the Caribbean. Because there was an event run by Andrew Morris called Fintech Islands in Barbados. I think Matteo was there.

Matteo was there as well. Breaking Banks Europe, yeah. Did he do a Breaking Banks from there? I think so.

I’ll have to check. Yeah, and Theodora Lau was there as well. But as an event, it was interesting because every other person I spoke to was saying, oh, I’m actually looking at building up a challenger bank for Jamaica.

Oh, I’m actually looking at building something for St. Kitts and Nevis. And you’ve got all of this is a literal and metaphorical blue ocean. So I’m kind of very curious as a region, because I think because of the geography, because the infrastructure, because of the regulation out there, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s going to be almost a microcosm of a wave of challenger banks in the Caribbean that could showcase a different sort of technology that I think the rest of the world could adopt.

I’m surprised that, you know, the likes of Revolut hasn’t already kind of landed in the Caribbean. So that’s an interesting point. I mean, we tend to, you and I tend to meet up at events, right? You know that I mean, over the last few years, that’s the most common time that you and I get together and enjoy a meal or whatever the case may be.

So going back over the years, what’s the most memorable events that you can recall or you recall with fondness or that was special to you? Oh, I’ve got to say a Money 2020 for the payments race, because. Oh, that was cool. Yeah.

You did that for a few years, right? Yeah, we did. I look back at it now, post-Covid, I think, what the hell are we doing? The basic thing was we had a group of people, influencers, both in fintech and out of fintech, including we had Max Fosch for one of the ones who’s the richest man in the world. And they would go from London to Amsterdam, but the long way around trying to visit as many countries as they can along the way, use as many types of transport as they can along the way.

But the catch being they can only use one type of payment, that be only use cash, only use card, only use mobile, only use gold, only use crypto, only use wearables. Gold would be tough. No, that’s the thing that surprised me.

The first time we did it with gold, I mean, he literally said, let me give you a genuine gold coin and you basically look after me for the day. And it was very, very community, actually. That’s something that became quite clear outside of the more digital focus payments.

The likes of gold and crypto became very community based. Then mobile, which we were still very text or messaging people, can I pay for my pet gold or just doing it in the cold. That’s something that became… Because it was still early days for mobile in some ways.

Mobile did incredibly well in the Round the World one. In fact, that was actually Max Fosch and he did win the entire race. But that was spectacular, but also slightly terrifying.

When at one point I had somebody driving a tank in Bulgaria, somebody in a hot air balloon in Lithuania, whilst I get a message saying we’re stuck at Russian customs. I’m going, oh, God, what’s going on? That was a wild… And I recall that event very fondly. It was their circus theme event as well.

So they actually was… It was some fantastic speakers. I think Steve Wozniak spoke at that one. But combining that with the payments race, it was a very strong sense of community and almost like a last big hurrah before the pandemic struck.

The payments race was always fun. And I was glad to be involved in a couple of those with you as well. You were a mentor, I think, for the Asia one as well.

But you’ve also interviewed hundreds of people, probably thousands, right, over the years. I know I have the exact figure. Yeah, what is it? I started on minus 17 because we counted wrong.

I’ve done one on one, four hundred and eighty something interviews like this. And then all the event ones on top of that. And the event ones on top of it.

Right. And you could be doing dozens of interviews at an event, right? I think the record was forty three in a day. Forty three in a day.

Boy, OK, it’s a lot of content. So let me ask you this. What are some of the more memorable interviews you’ve done and why? Frank Abagnale Jr. Oh, yeah.

Incredible human being. More interesting after Catch Me If You Can than during Catch Me If You Can, I would argue, but also a very decent human being as well. So, Frank, absolutely, I would put I would put up there.

There’s certain people, yourself, Jim Maroose, Leda Glyptis, I always very much enjoy, enjoy speaking with. And there’s I’ll tell you the worst interview that I did that should have been the best one. The worst interview I did, and it’s because it was I had about three hours notice.

I had no preparation. I thought I’m just going to have to go in with in this. And luckily, we got some good stuff from it.

But I think he looked at me like, what the hell are you doing? Was Will.I.Am. Oh, yeah, I was. Yeah, I sat down and I was like, right. Well, so here’s my situation for you.

We’re building an entirely new banking system on Mars. How are you going to build this from the absolute ground up? And he kind of looked at me, took off his glasses and took out his headphones because he always always has it in his ear pods, no matter who’s interviewing him. He goes, this is this is a glasses off question.

Really? I was like, OK, cool. And that’s a good sign, isn’t it? It’s a good sign. And then I was like, I’m so out of my depth.

I don’t know what he’s talking about because he’s like he’s a clever guy. He’s he makes people in Mensa look like they’re in kindergarten. And I was a little bit out of my depth.

Then I kind of not quite bottled it. But towards the end of it, I was like, cool. Right.

I think I think we’re wrapped up there. But that was an interesting interview. I don’t think I did a very good job in that one.

Oh, I I recall you doing that interview, but I don’t recall that question, which is interesting because I actually I’ve been thinking for a while I interviewed Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the Mars trilogy on this very issue right now on The Futurist. And I’ve been thinking for a while that a great way to think about the future of our system would be to write or model what a central banking system on Mars and what currency on Mars and what economic policy would look like, you know, because it would have very different drivers from what we have on the Earth. So maybe I’ll ask William to contribute to that.

Interesting. Another one that is a bit of an unusual one that I really enjoyed. I think he I think you know very well with him is Lawrence Levy, who was the former CFO of Pixar.

He was brought in by Steve Jobs to to take Pixar public. But what was interesting about that is he hung around after the acquisition from Disney was it was his job as a CFO. He’s giving a very unique this very well-documented time of Disney.

He’s giving a very unique perspective on it. But it’s more about how and this is, I think, very relevant with the lots of mergers and acquisitions happening in fintech today, how Pixar was acquired by Disney, how the culture of Pixar was acquired by Disney and took over Disney. And that’s what I think is interesting, because I would love to I would love to see, for example, revolutionize the way you think about production of animated movies and so forth.

The whole approach around creativity was just completely changed because Disney was in a bit of a bit of a rut then. And I would love to see, you know, imagine if Bank of America acquired the Starling Bank, but acquired its culture and it spread out the rest of it. I would love to see that in the financial services.

Because acquisitions is the greatest culture killer in banking. Yeah. All right.

So if I’m a fintech entrepreneur today, given that you’ve met seen so many pitchers, you’ve met so many founders, you’ve seen so many successes and failures. What would be your advice to me as an entrepreneur in terms of working with someone like FF News to get the best impact out of out of that moment? Let me spend money with this. If you’re sending me, we always cover press releases and stories.

And what I love is when people send press releases and stories, I don’t even need to read who it’s from, but I know who it’s from, from the text, from the copy. So if your pitch, if your story, if your press release, if your thought leadership piece, if you can take your name off it and people still know it’s you, then that for me, if you can do that, fantastic. You’re not just us, but across the board, you’re going to get a lot of coverage and a lot of a lot of the knock on effect of that, of that as well.

So make it that you’re that you’re truly unique and not unique in a soundbite, unique in a way that you can actually prove that you’re unique because you can take your name off and people know who you are. Perfect. So Ali Patterson, FF News, how do people find out and follow what you guys are doing in the space and, you know, keep up with your content? Yeah, I mean, on LinkedIn, we’re FF News.

Give us, give us a wee follow there. We’re on YouTube, TikTok, x.com. So follow us on there. And of course, the website, ffnews.com. Sorry, can I say that actually the real website, if you go to FinextraButBetter.com, that FinextraButBetter.com. That’s, that’s a great one.

I got, I got a pretty good start on Finextra with my blog, but it’s been a long, long time. But yeah, I haven’t changed significantly in the last little while. But Ali Patterson, thanks for joining us on Breaking Banks.

Awesome. Cheers, Brett. Pleasure.

That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by our U.S.-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severins, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Carlo Navarro and Sylvie Johnson. If you like this episode, don’t forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media or leave us a five-star review on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Facebook or wherever it is that you listen to our show.

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We’ll see you on Breaking Banks next week.