How Nigel started Railsbank
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In the beginning
Back in 2015 when Nigel began to think of the idea which became Railsbank (Railsr), the fintech scene was a lot different to where it is now.
It’s important to appreciate that the UK fintech industry didn’t emerge from a single moment, but from a number of developments and the real roots go back further than people think.
London had been a global financial hub for centuries and latterly is known as a pioneer of early digital finance infrastructure.
Take for example BACS, the automated payments system, which was launched in 1968.
However, the modern fintech era properly kicked off around 2007–2010, driven by a few converging forces such as the 2008 financial crisis (which shattered trust in traditional banks); smartphone proliferation (the iPhone launched 2007) and the Payment Services Directive, which came into EU/UK law in 2009, opening up payment infrastructure to non-banks.
In the first quarter of 2012 the media created the name “FinTech” to describe this emerging industry. From that point on, the fintech market category had its own identity and was born.
Between 2014 and 2016, fintech became an industry in the full sense. The FCA launched its Innovation Hub in 2014 and its regulatory sandbox in 2016, which was the first of its kind in the world. It gave start-ups a structured way to test products without full regulatory burden and was considered a genuine turning point, not just marketing.
By 2015, London was being credibly called the global fintech capital, overtaking New York in some measures of start-up activity and investment.
It was into this nascent environment that Nigel had his idea.
He’d steered his second start-up Currency Cloud, which he founded in 2007, to a point where its growth could continue, and was now looking for a new venture.
He’d created the world’s first deliverable foreign exchange API platform with Currency Cloud, now banking seemed to need the API modernisation treatment.
He could see that what fintech’s needed themselves was fintech first infrastructure, with services which were free of the high friction, restrictive and cumbersome legacy bank structures.
Let Nigel explain.
