The firms quietly rebuilding finance
This section highlights FinTech businesses solving real problems across financial services. Not the loudest companies, the useful ones. For each, the aim is the same: understand the problem being solved, how the solution works and why it matters.
What earns a place here
Plenty of firms describe themselves as innovative. A smaller number are actually changing how something works. These are the questions each one has to answer.
Is the problem real?
Someone in the industry should recognise this as a genuine friction they deal with, not a problem invented to justify a product.
Does the solution work today?
Deployed, in use, with clients. A roadmap is not a solution, however good the roadmap looks.
Can it actually be adopted?
Financial institutions move slowly for good reasons. Anything requiring an eighteen month integration rarely gets off the ground.
Who benefits in the end?
The best solutions improve outcomes for the underlying client, not just the margin of whoever bought the software.
In focus
A closer look at a business solving a problem that costs the industry more than it realises.
Before you read this, a declaration
I am a non-executive director of Flinq, which means I sit on its board without being part of the day to day running of the business, and I hold shares in it. That is a genuine commercial interest and you should weigh what follows accordingly.
Nobody has paid for this profile and there is no arrangement behind it. Flinq appears here because I think the problem it solves is real, which is the same reason I agreed to join the board. But informed is not the same as independent, and you are entitled to know which one this is before you read a word of it.
Flinq
Optimise cash management with fast time to value and better client outcomes.
The problem. Corporates and fiduciaries holding client cash sit on a surprisingly hard question: is that cash working as well as it could be? Answering it usually means pulling positions from several banks, in several currencies, into a spreadsheet that nobody entirely trusts. The result is cash that underperforms and revenue that never gets captured.
The solution. Flinq identified a gap in the corporate space for a niche software solution that analyses cash positions, improves outcomes for underlying clients and creates a new revenue line, all while strengthening existing banking relationships rather than competing with them.
Why it matters. Most treasury technology asks an institution to rip something out and start again. This does not. It sits alongside what is already there, which is precisely why it can be live in weeks rather than quarters, with minimal capital expenditure and low ongoing cost.
What Flinq offers
- Fast return on investment. Time to value of roughly six weeks from contract, which is unusual in this part of the market.
- Deployed without integrations. No lengthy technical project, and no queue behind the rest of the change portfolio.
- Secure by design. Built with a secure foundation from the ground up rather than added afterwards.
- Flexible. Serve clients collectively or configure the approach for each one individually.
- Scalable. Add more banks, more offices and more currencies as the business grows.
Minimal to no capital expenditure, low operating cost, and a revenue line that did not exist before.
The areas worth watching
Innovation in financial services rarely arrives as one dramatic moment. It arrives as several quiet improvements that turn out, together, to have changed something significant.
Payments and settlement
Cross-border payments still take days and cost more than they should. A lot of the most useful work in FinTech is aimed squarely at that gap.
Banking infrastructure
The systems banks actually run on are often decades old. Replacing them is expensive and risky, which makes anything that works alongside them valuable.
Digital asset custody
Institutional money will not move into digital assets without custody it can rely on. Solving that properly unlocks a great deal else.
Treasury and cash management
Cash sitting in the wrong place is one of the quietest costs in finance. Better visibility is usually worth more than better forecasting.
Tokenisation
Representing real assets on a shared ledger changes how quickly they can be transferred and who can hold them. The practical implications are still being worked out.
Artificial intelligence
Beyond the headlines, the near-term value in financial services is unglamorous: reconciliation, monitoring, client servicing and controls.
Building something worth writing about?
If you are solving a genuine problem in financial services and can explain how, I would be glad to hear about it. There is no fee, and nobody buys a place here. Interesting work is its own qualification. Where I have any interest in a business featured on this page, it is declared on the profile itself.