Traveling has never been easier before. We’ve got access to the most remote places in the world thanks to the plethora of offers to choose from. Tour operators, carriers and hotels fight to win clients, and as a result of massive competitiveness, we get lower prices and better offers. In theory. The wide range of options might cause confusion and decrease transparency on the market.

Swap is a P2P mobile payment app that allows users to send money to anyone on their contact list, any bank account, and any debit card number. The application has already established itself on the Mexican FinTech market. However, after the project matured, Swap's team needed help in adjusting the design to include new services and functionalities. They hired an external design team to help them with the transformation. It worked.

How to win in the financial world with the fintech expansion in full bloom? One of the largest UK banks decided to pull out the biggest guns - Lloyds Banking Group is investing more than £3bn in transforming the company and scouting talent from the digital world.

Whereas most people think of Silicon Valley as the promised land for startups, when it comes down to fintech, the landscape changes. The numbers speak for themselves - New York has beaten San Francisco in terms of fintech funding to become one of the strongest fintech hubs in the world.

In the next ten years, Stockholm wants to become Europe’s most attractive city region (according to the RUFS2050 Regional Development Plan for Stockholm). Thus, there is a big focus on innovation and urban development to improve residents’ lives and attract more business to the city. The real estate industry, which has long been very conservative, will be one of the industries that will undergo the most significant changes.

Have you ever wondered what is behind the success of a car assembly line? How they manage to optimise work and minimise waste, operating only on what brings value?

  2018 has been a volatile year for public equity markets around the world. Many institutional investors add alternative assets to their portfolios in order to decrease the correlation with public market volatility and pursue double-digit returns. Private Equity funds, a common investment amongst alternative assets, have been historically available only to institutional investors due to high minimums (starting around €10m). Moonfare, a Berlin-based FinTech startup, believes individual investors should also be able to invest in Private Equity funds. The company is building a technology platform that allows individual investors to invest in top-tier funds with low minimums (starting at £100k) and low fees (up to 0.5%).

Shine is a wonderful mobile app that brings calm and positivity into its users’ lives. The app is like a pep talk in your pocket, always there on the user’s phone, ready to share a daily text to help you deal with everyday stress or play a Shine Talk - a meditative recording on a subject related to wellness and mindfulness. The goal of Shine is to make self-care easier for all. I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Jonathan Uy, CTO of Shine, about the company’s origins, vision, values and future plans.

Keller Williams is the largest real estate franchise in the world (more than to 190,000 agents), also one of the largest privately held global residential real estate brokerages. You wouldn’t expect much from a 35-year old company from a traditional industry, would you? But Gary Keller, the charismatic founder and chairman of Keller Williams, is far from playing the safe bets.

This fintech is probably less known than many companies such as those operating in B2C markets. But OakNorth Holdings proved that it is possible to scale to the unicorn status in a market niche as long as you’ve the right strategy.