Fed up with the low level of banking services in France, two entrepreneurs decided to have a crack at business banking. Since the launch in 2016, the Qonto team has grown from the founding duo to 80 people. They have attracted over 20,000 small businesses to their bank and closed two funding rounds, pocketing about €12m.

If there’s one sector that continues to show growth and innovation, it’s Fintech. As our own Fintech barometer shows, the industry continues to surpass itself.

When they started, back in 2012, hardly anyone knew what insurtech was about. Neither were many people aware of the young German startup. Fast forward to 2018, Simplesurance, a German fintech company, is backed by both investor and e-commerce giants (Allianz and Rakuten, respectively), and has also partnered with OnePlus, Huawei, and Revolut.

I believe there are various ways to tell the story of Raisin. But let me take a shortcut. Here are some numbers behind the Berlin-based company that aims to build a leading one-stop shop for savings and investments in Europe.

From this piece - we call it Netguru’s Fintech Barometer - you will learn: The single most disruptive thing that may happen in the industry, according to Citigroup’s CEO The warning from JP Morgan and Chase CEO about feeling comfortable with being big How Bank of America and ABN Amro are tackling the fintech challenge (some interesting numbers here) Where MasterCard’s CEO sees an interesting fight between the fintech players and banks How fintech is boosting Tencent and Rakuten The unexpected impact of fintech on… ads on television In a nutshell - you are now reading the 2nd edition of the Netguru Fintech Barometer. The idea is that, each quarter, we scramble through all earning call and conference transcripts to check the pulse of the fintech industry.

AI and machine learning have moved from the fringes to the very centre of the technology debate. But which industry has the huge datasets, along with the capital and staffing resources, to make the most of AI? As recently reported by both PwC and Gartner, it is the financial sector.

If your game app lags, all it takes to get back into action is pressing the refresh button. No harm done, just a little irritation on the user side. The same experience is hardly acceptable for a banking app - if you seem unreliable or insecure, you won’t get a second chance on the market.

Facts, DevOps, figures, Blockchain and quotes from the financial industry leaders. We have collated them all together to bring you the most important trends shaping financial services today.

We’ve talked to Eddie Dubiel, a representative of Finstreet, about the future of one of their project, the difficulties of operating in the highly regulated German financial sector, and about bringing innovation into large fintech organisations. The insights we gathered shed light on doing business on this highly desirable and competitive market.

From this interview, you will learn: How Peter Grosskopf, solarisBank’s CTO, scaled up a tech team How having no financial background was actually the prerequisite in his leading role in the banking platform What Lego bricks have in common with digital banking What the recent investment by BBVA might mean for the Berlin-based fintech startup. For anyone not yet familiar with the company: solarisBank is a Berlin-based, 150-person tech company with a full banking license, serving 60 corporate customers. It all started with the concept of building solarisBank as the first banking platform native to the digital economy – a platform that would enable any company to offer financial services. A few years ago, fintech startups used to working in the agile way, were struggling with lengthy and inefficient setup processes with traditional banks.