Why Stripe’s bullish on UK fintech

Why Stripe’s bullish on UK fintech

This interview originally appeared on PaymentEye

Stripe’s bullish on UK fintech. The $5bn San Francisco payments firm now powers many of London’s most prominent fintech companies from TransferWise and Nutmeg to Seedrs and it’s only going to keep growing its presence in the UK, which is now its second biggest market globally after the US. Backed by the likes of Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is moving to new offices in Old Street with space for 100 people and will expand its UK team to 40 this year. Globally it plans to grow from 400 to 1,000 employees this year.

Now processing “billions” of pounds annually for “hundreds of thousands” of companies globally Stripe continues to try and galvanise the way money moves round the world – recently launching a new product suite called Atlas to help startups get off the ground faster. Here, head of UK growth James Allgrove talks UK fintech and what’s ahead in 2016.

There’s a lot of hype around London fintech, but it can’t be all good. What do you identify as the unfriendliest parts about the city for fintech companies right now?

Innovation in fintech generally favours the little guy – it’s bringing tools to the upstarts to transact globally, and entrepreneurs are eventually in a position to compete on the merit of their product rather than their size. This makes for a highly competitive environment in London fintech — so, any fintech startup risks losing ground to the next entrepreneur if they don’t innovate quickly enough or build on the right infrastructure to scale internationally.

 

 

How do the US and UK fintech scenes compare?

Our founders John and Patrick Collison built Stripe in San Francisco where the tight-knit developer community made it easy to establish a strong feedback loop with our early users. In particular, Y-Combinator offered a useful early network with a good level of trust. Enthusiasm in the community spread quickly by word of mouth and this was a big catalyst in Stripe’s early traction.

As the UK fintech ecosystem begins to mature, we’re seeing quite a few similarities between what’s happening here and what happened in Silicon Valley in the early days of Stripe. A strong pool of developer talent combined with the proximity to a global financial hub and a rich network of fintech accelerators is producing a stream of successful fintech startups. The numbers don’t lie: UK fintech generated approximately £6.6 billion in revenue in 2015, so it’s been a real coming of age for London. What’s most exciting for us at Stripe is that we see it first-hand in our work with growth-stage fintech companies like Nutmeg, iwoca and LendInvest, as well as our involvement at accelerators like Techstars and Seedcamp.

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