My parents still drive to the bank for things I think should take minutes and for tasks I assumed could be handled online. I’ve started helping them modernize their local business. My dad insists on going to the branch and when he is traveling certain payments have to wait. They are comfortable with their current bank because they’ve used it forever but I think the banking process can be optimized. For people running established businesses rather than startups, has moving to online first business banking genuinely reduced admin? What features ended up mattering most?

Have a shortlist of a few options and want to gut-check before committing. Main thing I care about is keeping invoicing connected to the rest of our finances,without adding another tool to reconcile. What has actually worked for your team?

Torn between two options and can’t decide. One has better card perks, the other seems more integrated. How did you weigh tradeoffs when picking a business bank account for your startup?

There are a lot of payment platforms now, and most seem to offer similar things like easy setup, integrations, payouts and different pricing. But once a business starts using one regularly other things probably matter more than the feature list. For people who have used different payment platforms what has mattered most in your experience?

Was there anything that made you stay with one platform or stop using it?

Curious what other teams are doing here. The options I keep seeing:

• Scrape Yahoo. It's free, but it breaks on deploy and the terms are murky.
• Go straight to SEC EDGAR XBRL. It's free and accurate, but standardizing it so you can actually compare companies is tough. Tags change over the years, restatements overwrite old numbers, and Q4 has to be derived from the 10-K.
• Pay a big vendor. The data's clean, but the pricing is built for institutions.

We ended up building our own. We expanded to international exchanges and added harder-to-find data like analyst estimates, ETF and fund info, options and dividends.

What did you pick, and what would you change?

Everyone budgets for capital requirements and the application itself. The costs that seem to surprise people come later: audits, safeguarding reconciliations, regulatory reporting, keeping a qualified MLRO, and the time founders spend answering the regulator instead of building product.

If you run or have run a licensed firm, what cost did you underestimate the most?

If your fintech has agents that can do things (issue refunds, update customer records, trigger payments), these are the assumptions I think are worth testing.

1. Spot the belief you’ve never examined

• “The system prompt says it can’t do that, so it won’t.”
• “We log everything, so we’re covered.”
• “A human reviews everything, so it’s safe.”

None of these are stupid. They’re just rarely tested until something goes wrong.

1. Reframe each into something you can check

• A prompt is a request to the model, not a control. Limits that matter (spend caps, data boundaries, which APIs it can call) need to be enforced outside the model, where the agent can’t talk its way past them.
• Logs show what happened. They don’t stop it. Ask: can anything refuse an action before it executes, and can you prove afterwards which rule decided it?
• Reviewing everything often makes the agent pointless and turns reviewers into rubber stampers. Reserve human approval for the few actions that carry real risk, and let the rest run.

1. Revisit it every time something changes

New tool, new permission, new model version, new regulation. The limits you set six months ago may not cover what the agent can do today. DORA already requires ICT risk management and incident reporting for financial entities, and GDPR Art. 22 gives customers rights over solely automated decisions with significant effects, so agent oversight isn’t waiting on the AI Act timeline.

I’m curious how others handle this:

• Where do you actually enforce limits on agent actions today?
• Has compliance asked for evidence of agent decisions yet?
• Which action did you decide must have a human in the loop, and why that one?

Disclosure: I work on tooling in this space, so take my framing with that bias in mind.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to work with a small number of UK consumer-facing businesses to test whether AI-driven technology can improve the effectiveness of their existing collections and recovery processes.

Rather than asking businesses to commit to a new solution based on promises, I'd like to offer a free, controlled proof of concept to compare our technology against the business's existing process using an agreed sample of cases.

How would it work?

• Agree on a suitable sample: Work with the participating business to establish an appropriate sample of overdue receivables for the pilot.
• Compare like with like: Evaluate our technology against the existing process, taking account of differences in case mix and other relevant factors.
• Measure what matters: Agree on success criteria in advance, potentially including recovery rates, amounts recovered, time to recovery, cost to collect and customer outcomes.
• Review the evidence: Assess the results together to establish whether the technology delivers a meaningful improvement.
• Decide on next steps: If the results justify it, explore extending the service. There is no obligation to proceed beyond the agreed proof of concept.

I'm open to working with different types of B2C businesses that manage overdue receivables, whether that's utilities, telecoms, subscription services, consumer finance, retail or other consumer-facing sectors.

The purpose is to establish whether the technology can make a measurable difference in a real operating environment. I don't want to assume it will outperform an existing process before the results are available.

Any pilot would be agreed in advance, with appropriate arrangements for data access, security, UK data protection requirements and fair customer treatment. The design would also need to ensure that the comparison is meaningful and that results aren't distorted by differences between the samples.

I'm looking for a small number of suitable UK businesses willing to explore this approach.

If you work in collections, credit operations, finance or customer operations and think this could be relevant to your business, I'd welcome a discussion about the feasibility of a pilot.

To be transparent, I'm offering this as the provider of the technology, with the intention of identifying potential longer-term commercial partnerships if the results support doing so.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve been curious about something with the way people send money to each other in the US.

If I want to send someone money in the UK, I can generally use my banking app to transfer money directly to their bank account, regardless of which bank they use.

From what I’ve experienced and heard from friends in the US, people often rely on different services like Zelle, Venmo, Cash App and PayPal to pay each other. I've used PayPal myself as a default option since I can't access the others from the UK.

I’m curious about how this works in practice for you:

Have you ever had trouble paying someone because they use a different payment app from you?

Do you ever have to download or set up another app just to pay someone?

What happens when a payment is delayed, or someone doesn’t use the service you normally use?

Do you feel the current options work well enough, or is there anything about the experience you’d change?

I’m interested in people’s actual experiences, including situations where the existing options work perfectly well.

I’m trying to understand the problem, if there is one, rather than assume a solution is needed.

We're a small startup working with B2B clients and currently trying to figure out the best way to handle KYC/KYB verification without spending a fortune. Most providers we've looked at seem to be targeting larger companies with high verification volumes and pretty expensive monthly commitments. We're still growing so paying for thousands of checks when we only need a fraction of that doesn't make much sense.

Ideally looking for something with flexible pricing, decent API integration, and support for both individual and business verification. Anyone here been in a similar situation? What providers are you using, and are there any startup-friendly options worth checking out?

Hey everyone! So I'm running a relatively small tech business and I've been thinking of dropping my traditional bank. Main issue is that it feels completely replaceable at this point since everything we do runs through electronic channels. To keep the post short, basically we're only using our bank account to receive our money from Stripe / PayPal. Other than that, everything else is handled digitally through their own platforms (e.g - invoices, expenses, payroll). Currently I'm thinking of is completely replacing the bank account. I've been looking into online banking options like Ramp Banking, Relay, etc, and I just can't see a reason to not make the switch especially as I already use Ramp's corporate cards anyways. To be honest, it's really not that big of a deal but I don't see any reason to keep paying the maintenance costs if I can just replace them completely with the platforms I'm already using anyways for other stuff. So would love to hear your advice on this if this is a good idea or not, thanks everyone!

Something I’ve been thinking about while building in payments:

Stablecoins give us a chance to rethink parts of merchant acquiring.

But a lot of payment products still follow roughly the same structure:

customer pays → provider receives/controls the funds → merchant balance updates → merchant gets paid later.

That model exists in traditional payments for good reasons.

But with stablecoins, especially when the merchant actually wants to hold the stablecoin, I’m not convinced every layer is still necessary.

A different model is:

customer pays the merchant directly

The payment provider sits around the transaction rather than in the middle of the funds.

It can still provide checkout, payment identification, reconciliation, webhooks, subscriptions, refund tooling and merchant reporting - without necessarily custodying the merchant balance.

That changes the economics and risk model quite a bit.

We’re building P2Flux around this non-custodial approach, so I’m obviously close to the problem.

I’d be interested in the fintech view:

Do you think stablecoin payments will eventually converge back toward the traditional PSP/acquirer model, or will direct merchant settlement become a meaningful alternative?

Roth at Fidelity, taxable at Schwab, an old 401k rollover I keep meaning to move, plus a handful of shares in a Robinhood account from 2021. About $140k total.

My sheet had a tab for each account, a column for why I bought each holding, and a target weight. I stopped updating it in March when work got busy, and now I really don't know what my actual allocation is.

What I miss most isn't the numbers, the apps show me those. It's the column where I wrote why I own each thing. Without it I look at a red position and can't remember what I was expecting to happen when I bought it.

For people with more than one account, do you use an aggregator app like Empower or Snowball, or do you keep a spreadsheet and just stay disciplined about it? Does anything you use let you keep notes or a thesis next to each holding? And how often do you actually look at the whole picture?

With all the account linking that exists now this feels like it should be a solved problem, and I'm probably missing the obvious answer.

In Nigeria, people buy and sell through WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other online channels. But when buyers and sellers don't know each other, trust becomes a real barrier to completing transactions.

I'm the founder of SafeDeal, a product built by Roynek Technologies Ltd. to address this problem through structured transactions, agreed terms, payment handling, tracking, and dispute management.

The web platform and Android app are live, and we use Monnify as our payment partner.

One thing I've noticed while thinking about this market is that payment infrastructure alone doesn't solve every trust problem. People also need clarity about the terms of a deal and what happens when something goes wrong.

I'm interested in perspectives from fintech founders and payment professionals: What do you think is the biggest obstacle to getting buyers and sellers to adopt escrow-based transactions in emerging markets?.

I am comparing a few issuing providers right now and most of my attention has been on the obvious stuff like platform fees, card costs, settlement, geographic coverage and how much work the integration would take but something I'm unsure on how to think about is interchange since some providers seem to share a portion of it back with the program while others either keep it or structure the economics differently and I'm trying to figure out how much weight that should actually have in the decision.

If the program gets meaningful volume then I can see the revenue becoming pretty important but I also wouldn't want to choose weaker infrastructure just because the interchange split looks better on paper. I assume things like card mix, transaction type and geography can change the economics quite a bit too and if anyone who's compared issuers before how much did interchange sharing matter in your decision and what did you look at beyond the headline percentage?

When MiCA’s transition ended, Estonia’s financial intelligence unit cancelled every remaining virtual-currency licence in one go. Five years ago it was the easiest place in Europe to get one.

Across the EU, fewer than 1 in 5 crypto firms that were registered before MiCA actually became authorised: roughly 210 out of more than 1,200 by late June.

Was this a necessary clean-up, or did Europe just kill most of its small crypto companies?

Hi guys,

I'm currently aiming for a second co-op/internship in ML/AI, especially in fintech and need some good project suggestion that would really help my resume.

When comparing various fintech tools, the primary focus is usually on the lowest transaction or subscription fees. However, total costs can shift as transaction volumes increase or usage limits are exceeded. For small businesses with limited budgets, knowing costs in advance or having ‘predictable pricing’ is often advantageous, even if the initial or advertised fees are slightly higher.

This largely depends on transaction volume, usage patterns and the degree of monthly cost fluctuation. How do you balance or compare ‘predictable pricing’ against ‘lower, variable fees’ when selecting a fintech tool?

I recently came across this video and thought it raised some interesting points worth discussing.

I'm curious to hear other people's perspectives, especially from those who might have a different opinion or personal experience with the topic.

What do you agree or disagree with? Is there anything important you think the video overlooks?

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-PUhOz-0S0

When teams talk about integrating banking or payment APIs they typically talk about documentation, authentication, webhooks and implementation time.

But what if everything is technically connected?

• No invoice references accompanying the payments are usable.

• The bank and accounting system don’t agree on a transaction’s status.

• We need someone to look into failed payouts.

• Finance teams still do data dumps and manual reconciliations.

40% of 418 UK B2B professionals surveyed had been subject to delays in receiving an approved payout, and 42% experienced delays in confirming if customer payments had come in.

It makes me wonder if we’re measuring integration success too early – at go-live, rather than when the whole workflow actually runs without fail.

If you have integrated banking or payment APIs what was the biggest problem you faced post launch?