Hosted by Conny Dorrestijn (Founder of Bankifi) and Brian van Wachem (Founder of RedSnap), the podcast series will invite fintech experts from around the globe to discuss all things fintech.  The first episode featured a man everyone in the fintech scene is familiar with: Chris Skinner.

Introduced as the “godfather of fintech”, he was invited to delve into the news and trends catching his attention. Firstly, he spoke of governmental attempts to curb environmental damage, noting they often concentrate on the average person in the street (eg. by banning plastic bags) rather than chasing those that could make a difference overnight. “Since 1988, 70% of damaging emissions have been caused by 100 companies,” continuing, that banks are essentially funding climate change and those are the two groups of companies that we should be chasing.

He also tackled increasing digitisation in everything from the way we bank to the way we parent, dispelling the commonly held belief that banks are not changing or digitising, naming only five that are doing it well (JP Morgan Chase, ING, BBVA, DBS Bank and China Merchants Bank). He uses a parent-child metaphor to describe how banks are the parents that want to build a strong, resilient and secure family home and the kids, fintechs, want to break everything and change the world. Just like a parent, the incumbents must nurture and mentor the fintech children and learn to integrate and curate a marketplace of their financial services.

Finally, he discusses the differences between the European and Chinese markets that has allowed the rise of integrated super-platforms from the likes of Ant Financial and Tencent. The scale of their technology is “incredible” and have created the “integrated equivalent of Amazon, Facebook and PayPal,” which couldn’t work in Europe as the regulators see it as too powerful.