Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

The Independent's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn commission.

How a fintech startup is born

Discover the ideas and technology behind some of the UK’s growing businesses

Monday 25 February 2019 18:13 GMT

If you’ve ever applied for a mortgage, tried to access your credit rating or even opened a new bank account, chances are you may have found it a difficult process to go through. Whether you thought it expensive, confusing or both, it probably left you wondering if there was an easier way.

You’re not alone. It is this kind of dissatisfaction with the status quo that has led to a rise in the number of fintech startups, as speakers at The Journey of a Fintech Startup, at the AWS FS: Insight conference in London, explained.

"I felt disempowered," said Dan Hegarty, founder of Habito, while speaking about how his online mortgage brokerage came about. Despite having experience in the financial services industry, he found the process of getting a mortgage bewildering and error-prone. He decided there had to be a better way, which led him to set up the company.

For Megan Caywood, ex-chief platform officer Starling Bank, now head of consumer strategy at Barclays, it was a similar story. Her company arose from the fact that everyone needs a bank account "but the experience isn't good".

And, when it came to getting access to credit ratings, Barry Laffoy and Klaus Thorup told how they found it expensive and complicated – leading to the creation of their firm ClearScore.

Speed is key

Identifying a problem is one thing. It's another to actually solve it, and the speakers emphasised the need to be able to move quickly. Hegarty went from a team of three at his kitchen table to seed funding six months later and launch a further six months after that.

Along the way, he said, "you have to hire some grown-ups". He explained that scaling-up quickly is difficult enough without reinventing the wheel unnecessarily, so these “grown-ups” – with their perceived wisdom – can help.

Caywood also spoke of scaling: scaling the organisation, scaling customers and scaling the business. Each is slightly different, she said, but all rely on the ability to roll out technology at pace, which is where the cloud has been vital.

Whether it's coping with an influx of new customers or integrating best-in-class fintechs to its marketplace, the ability to auto-scale capacity with AWS made Starling’s task significantly easier, she added.

Expanding capabilities

For ClearScore, the scaling challenge involved shifting from its initial monolithic, IT structure to a cloud-based architecture. Like Starling, the company relied on AWS to expand its capabilities quickly, the move itself mirroring Amazon's own journey, said Gavin Jackson, managing director, UK and Ireland, for AWS financial services.

In closing, Hegarty said that his moment of frustration at his kitchen table was when he was closest to the mindset of one of his customers. As the business grows, he gets further from that mindset every day. That's why, he said, his key piece of advice for any startup is “stay true to your customer obsession”.

Find out more about how AWS can support your fintech business here

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in