Webinar Review: Increasing Resilience in FinTech

Author: Joe Roche · September 14, 2020

On Friday 11th September, the FinTech North Community came together virtually to discuss Resilience in FinTech.

This webinar was supported by key FinTech North supporters RSM UK, as part of Scotland FinTech Festival (7th September – 5th October).

If you missed the webinar, or if you’d like to re-cap the discussion around Increasing Resilience, you can watch a recording of the webinar by clicking the image below:

Joe Roche, Engagement Manager at FinTech North, introduced the event and explained more about FinTech North.

Julian Wells, Director of Whitecap Consulting and FinTech North, started by providing a UK FinTech Sector Update:

Over the summer some new industry insight has been published, including a report from EY which found the UK FinTech sector delivered £11bn of revenue in 2019 (up from £6.6bn in 2015) and now accounts for c.8% of total financial services output of £132bn.
Interestingly, 81% of this revenue can be attributed to B2B, 21% to B2C. It is thought this may relate to the primary source of revenue, as many FinTechs operate both models. The report highlighted a growing skills gap in FS, which increased by 30% between 2015-17, a period during which it decreased in other sectors. It would be interesting to see more recent data.
Despite the impact of COVID-19, funding has held up strongly in the sector with various recent reports (including KPMG and Beauhurst) have show that investment has increased year on year. Investors have indicated that FinTech valuations have also held up, which suggests FinTech has been a resilient sector through the pandemic. Beauhurst reported 99 FinTech deals were completed between January and June 2020, an increase of about 5% on the same period the previous year.
The UK FinTech Sector Review was commissioned in March 2020 and is designed to inform Government thinking on the fintech sector ahead of the March 2021 Budget. It has five ‘chapters’: Investment, Talent & Skills, Policy, International attractiveness, and National Connectivity. For the National Connectivity workstream the objectives are: Map and highlight fintech activity/capability/areas of excellence across the UK; remove the current barriers to growth regionally and; identify opportunities for connecting the regions to improve growth. FinTech North has been invited to help feed into the Review and we are interested to get insight into how the regions can connect better. Please feel free to email us at joe@fintechnorth.uk

Next, Damian Webb, Partner at RSM UK, introduced Standby Servicing and explained RSM’s standby servicing offering. Damian explained that standby servicing is a back up service designed to ensure a financial institution can be orderly wound down in the event of a failure of a financial institution. A back up service is a regulatory requirement for FCA registered businesses and is often a pre-requisite for institutional funders looking to lend via lending platforms.

Richard Carter, Managing Director at Equiniti Credit Services, then spoke about Operational Resilience, coming at things from a process perspective when implementing Resilience plans. Richard broke this down accordingly:

Identify – services, disruption and circumstances
Map – supporting systems and processes
Assess – failure of system or processes
Test – using scenarios and learning from experience
Invest – in ability to respond and recover from disruption
Communicate – timely information to all relevant stakeholders

Patrick Croal, Senior Manager at RSM, covered Resilience from a Risk angle. Patrick acknowledged the importance of people to business continuity planning. Patrick’s 3 take-away points were:

The landscape is changing quickly. FinTechs must be agile with responding to change
Business continuity planning is no longer a nice to have, it must be realistic and actionable.
Learn from recent experience and fully understand the implications of covid-19 on your business.

Finally, Joe Roche highlighted two upcoming FinTech North events: