After an Easter break my series continues and with another guest writer - this time another great industry colleague   Reena Raichura   founder of Finergise who offers her advice on an often overlooked and confused subgenre - Product Marketing. If you want to catch up on the rest of the series than click   here . Otherwise thanks for reading and for your comments so far but now, over to you, Reena. "Build it and they will come" is a common mistake that many startups (and more

So, thanks to everyone for reading this series and for your likes and comments so far. Today we are going in a slightly different direction and I would like to introduce you to   Loreta Bahtchevanova , who runs marketing at   Rapid Addition Limited . Having collaborated with her on a number of projects, she has demonstrated that she is a more than capable Fintech Marketeer (especially in digital). It seemed only natural therefore to get her insights on this subject so, read h

In Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto there is an amazing scene early on where a wizened village elder addresses the rest of the tribe. He tells a story about Man’s insatiable desires and how it will all end badly. Lit by the flickering flames of the campfire, the faces of the tribe members are transfixed. Storytelling as a way of transmitting (and receiving) valuable information is almost as old as mankind itself - just go back 36,000 years and look at the Chauvet cave paintings in Fra

I remember taking my seat for my first lecture at Manchester University (admittedly a few years ago now). My course was marketing with psychology and buyer behaviour. To be honest I didn't have a particular draw to marketing back then other than it seemed massively more interesting than accounting or production control and a lot less work than law or medicine. Anyway, after a while the lecturer appears, pauses, and then says “if you remember nothing else about this course the

I spent the summer reflecting on the challenges of legacy technology stacks (or LegTech for short) within our industry. It's a problem that has blighted our industry for years and it is only going to get worse as New Tech (AI anyone) leaves Trad Tech jogging in its smoke.  Now multiply this problem by T+1, 24x7 trading and DORA regulations and the pain and business declivity go to 11. For legacy vendors, it is a real problem too. Their traditional stickiness is coming into qu

July 3, 2025 I had a great morning yesterday co-hosting an event at the Broker Club on Reshaping UK Retail Trading. The event was sponsored by  Quod Financial  and was well attended by the major brokers on the RSP network and some firms with different business models such as Trading 212.  We all know the problem. If you look across the pond, stock markets in the US are supported (and sometimes driven) by massive and very active retail participation. So, why is retail particip

Thanks to everyone who read my last piece that explained why investing in tactical marketing activities without first having a clear...

I talk to many Fintech CEO’s in my travels and most are charismatic, smart, determined, and business savvy, And yet, very f ew have a...

Chatting to industry colleagues the other day, we were bemoaning that capital markets have always been a highly cyclical industry and we...

The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster accurately predicts the world we all now live in, sitting safely cocooned from the dangers of the...

Different V57 clients discussing the future of Financial Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhngf1fy53w

Thanks to Toby at Harrington Starr for inviting me onto FinTech TV last week https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6675724...

Perhaps counterintuitively, I opened a retail brokerage account last Friday. My rationale was two-fold.  First, I wanted to see how easy...

The news coverage of the spread of COVID-19 or, more popularly, Coronavirus seems more like a scene from some dystopian sci-fi movie...

are many messages contained within Coleridge’s famous Rime of the Ancient Mariner but really it's about appreciating those things around...

New blog from V57 founder Steve Grob on the true picture of SI liquidity in Europe https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/its-si-jim-we-know-stev...

Thanks again to CNBC for inviting me on their show https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/10/07/hong-kong-may-struggle-to-find-another-partner-i...

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/09/12/takeover-of-lse-would-create-problems-for-politicians-strategist-says.html

Einstein famously said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results”. Likewise, the fabric...

There has been a lot of commentary on the proposed acquisition of Refinitiv by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) but much of it...