Jifiti

Partnerships & Solutions Manager

Google

Analytical Consultant

Graduway

Sales Development Representative

Midrag- Service rating LTD

Business Development Team Lead

Keshet - Educational Tourism

Account Manager

High Q

Teacher

Israel Defense Forces

Logistics

After Covid-19 kicking my career's butt in early 2020, I've pivoted from educational tourism to hi-tech, hitting the ground running in order to quickly adapt to a changed reality and environment. And I try to do that while keeping my smile.

Growing up, I was lucky enough to fly and visit family in Europe & US.

I don't know if it's a European thing, a generational thing or a personality trait, but my mom would always make sure we're at the airport 4-5 hours before a flight.

Couple this with military training (coming early to a meeting is being on time, arriving on time is being late), and you get a lot of time waiting for flights!

For some reason though, these hours are often some of my most focused - so much so I'm considering asking the airport to open a co-working space 😝 

London here I come!

Yehuda Matar

Dad. Partnerships @ Jifiti. Budding Travel Addict. Current Expat.

Proud and excited to be moderating the big Buy / Build panel discussion! (or as the young'uns say - I'm doing a whatchamacallit!)

The fintech-bank relationship has always been a complex one - from a spectrum of direct competition to enablers and investment opportunities, there are so many interesting ways we've seen such relationships come to life. 

Join me and a panel of experts to hear about the dilemma banks face in this space, learnings from past successes and failures, and possibly some terrible dad jokes (link in the first comment)!

Looking forward to hearing our panelists David Woolnough, Ewa Wojcik & Gaurav Sethi - and of course our very own Jifiti CEO Yaacov Martin. 

Sincerely excited to be able to geek out about this topic with thought leaders in the space, and thank you for the team that made this happen.

Nina Driscoll Maya Mason Shaul Weisband Nici Pillemer Elana Diner & Marcia Williams

London is easily in my top 5 favorite cities to visit.

Hit me up for a coffee, beer or  banking / lending geek-out session!

Heading to MoneyLIVE next week?

So is Yehuda Matar, your go-to guy for everything Embedded Lending.
Ping him to set a meeting or chat over coffee.

See you there!

Wrapping up my visit to London, I really enjoyed finally meeting in person one of the most interesting people I've recently met - Derrick Khan, my FIS partner in crime.

Successful partnerships begin at the personal level, and I am excited to have an intelligent, funny and endlessly curious partner to work with (yes, flattery does get you everywhere). 

Looking forward to great things together Derrick Khan!

(Derrick looks tough in the picture, and he is, but I promise you he enjoyed the conversation as much as I did!)

When 90% of your business is driven by partnerships, partnerships aren't simply a strategy, but basically the responsibility of every person in the company.

This was just one of the interesting tidbits I picked up at the Partnership Leaders' event in Amsterdam yesterday: Palo Alto Networks is so dependent on partnerships that they had to disclose it in their shareholder filings!

It was a pleasure meeting thought leaders and peers, taking a step back to reflect on the why, how and what of our day to day. Shout out to Chris Samila, Cari Kesten & Greg Higgins and anyone else involved in organizing the event!

A few things that stood out to me:

1. When asked about their most important partners in the ecosystem, Derk Brinxma spoke to the importance of segmenting partners, understanding their place in the value chain and catering to each accordingly. This may sound obvious, but is much harder done than said.

2. Chris Samila also underlined the importance of your APIs - ease of integration is always a challenge, and is becoming even more important.

3. Jasper Lounio quoted Rene Bonvanie's quote that really describes partnerships well - "running a marathon at sprint speed". Jasper shared that when talking about channel partnerships, the only way to success is if the entire company is involved, partnerships serving as the enabler connecting the relevant departments from each company - sales to sales, finance to finance etc. 

There's a lot more to share, but I have to go pick up my 3 year old!

Was great meeting new people and hearing new perspectives - I definitely recommend checking out Partnership Leaders event if you haven't yet!

Cool use of AI:

My dad is visiting us, so I took him to a nearby town, Leiden. 

In the Young Rembrandt studio there one can take a picture of yourself, and 6 different images will be generated - a portrait in Rembrandt style (below is mine, I think I could be a rather fetching aristocrat!).

This was my first time encountering AI use in-store - what are other AI use cases you already encountered out in the wild?

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Just came back from a wildly successful MoneyLIVE event.

Thought I'd share about a talk that blew my mind - Neil Evans shared a little bit about the story of OakNorth.

OakNorth founders had a previous business - research and data about companies, specifically larger ones. Running low on cash, they needed 100k in order to keep the business going - and were turned down by 3 different UK banks. After a few quick months in the US, the founders secured a $10M credit facility from a US lender. 

That's where the founders understood there is something wrong with access to business finance in the UK. OakNorth have generated $12B in loans, losing only $7M(!) over the past 7 years. 

70% of OakNorth's business is returning and referred businesses, attesting to high customer satisfaction (or perhaps lack of proper competition? 😇 ).

Past all these really interesting details, Neil shared that a lot of the success was from their innovative underwriting capabilities - not necessarily using different data that incumbent lenders - rather using the same data and analyzing it in different ways, generating insights that allowed OakNorth to approve business loans that the incumbents weren't even considering. 

I believe it was Ron Shevlin that discussed the danger of experience, especially in banking - the fact things have been done in a certain way doesn't mean it's the right way. The banking scene in the UK hadn't changed for decades, then comes OakNorth and focuses on looking at the same businesses, with the same data, in a more innovative way - and everything changes.

I loved this story - a lot to learn I think!

Open Banking - Hype vs. Adoption

Another panel I managed to attend at MoneyLIVE - an open banking panel with Ana Climente, Yash M. & Rebecca Shao.

Open banking enables sharing of financial data with 3rd-party providers. For example, I use an app that categorizes and identifies all my household expenses, identifying spending trends and recommending different ways I can save and invest more. Without access to the cashflow data from my bank account, this app wouldn't be able to exist in a scalable, real-time way.

The talk was interesting, as Yash & Rebecca represented an often overlooked entity in the open banking value chain - sellers (retailers / merchants). Paying with open banking bypasses the card networks, meaning merchants don't pay Mastercard / Visa interchange.

Rebecca Shao shared it's really all about the experience. As a modern luxury brand, Jaguar can use the access to a richer financial profile of a customer to offer a smoother experience - e.g. less friction around payments (as opposed to lending, where some friction is always healthy for responsible lending, with payments you really only realize they're there when something doesn't work). Rebecca also shared that with the money saved on interchange, they can now offer more rewards to the customer. 

Yash M. shared that from their perspective, Samsung uses their brand awareness and consumer trust to get consumers in the door, but open banking can be used to improve customer loyalty and retention - offering personalized offers with the data accessed and analyzed during the open banking connectivity. 

Open banking's value is in a richer data set, convenience, and possibly cost (jury's still out - if a chargeback setup needs to be built for open banking payments, will it still be cheaper)?

To play devil's advocate, when I currently pay with the Dutch iDEAL, I go through many more screens and approvals than simply using my Apple / Google wallet.

So if the entire panel agreed that open banking is all about making a convenient experience for the customer, I'm not sure the end product is 100% competitive with cards just yet.

I think open banking has excellent use cases, but we're far from open banking bringing down the card networks just yet. 

What do you think?

Ski & Banking

I Took the fam to ski for the first time in their lives (I, of course, lorded over my wife and girls the fact I already did it once or twice, and am thus an-all knowing master. Normal dad routine).

Before that I attended the European Digital Finance Conference, organized by The Banking 50's  🎤Elena Kriek 🇺🇦 & Morten Kriek. Even though this was already almost 2 weeks ago, better late than never - and I believe credit should be given when and where it's due (I do work in embedded lending, after all!). 

A great event with on-point conversations - I recommend going! 

Some highlights I found interesting (this could have been a reaaaallly long post if I mentioned every single one!):

- When Francesco Aghemio from Revolut asked how many people had a Revolt account in the crowd, it seemed like at least 50% of the people raised their hands. As much more than 50% of the crowd were bankers, I found that interesting (and a little amusing 😆).

- Volodymyr Mudryi's story of banking during a war, specifically providing banking services when telco companies aren't functioning and can't support customer identification, reminded me of the dangers with tech - when the servers are down everything goes south, fast - as we recently saw with some UK banks. It was also a reminder of how crucial a service banks provide, and how it's taken for granted as long as it works smoothly. 

- AI was of course mentioned in many talks, focusing mostly on customer communication, marketing and support, as well as fraud, credit scoring and analysis of which banking product a bank should focus on, for which customer segment. 

- Giorgi Shagidze, CFA's description of the evolution of digital banking, with consumers expecting banking services when, how and where they prefer. An interesting example mentioned was that the majority of opened bank accounts was between 10 PM and 1 AM!

- At a recent event I heard Radovan Jelasity quote someone (I forget exactly who): "US innovates, China imitates, Europe regulates". Ulrich Loof's take resonated with me - regulation is necessary, but it really must be quality regulation - balancing consumer protections with a competitive landscape that drives growth. Easier said than done!

This post is long enough, so I'll share about additional interesting tidbits in another post - more to come about AI & banking, quirky banking regulation, fintech-bank relationships and more!

(I, like you, am still trying to figure out why the title of my post is what it is. Maybe my head still hasn't cleared up from that ski fall!).

Stay tuned 🤠

As you may have seen, I'm at MoneyLIVE in London right now. In addition to meeting partners and friends, I'm trying to attend as many talks as I can - and want to share some tidbits, on the spectrum of "Oh, that's interesting" to "damn, that's really interesting", all the way to "dayum that's mind blowing"!

Let's start with Ron van Kemenade's talk that kicked off the entire day. Ron moved from ING to Lloyds Bank after 20 years, talking about the transformation incumbent banks (or High Street Banks, here in the UK) must go through, if they don't want to lose relevance. 

Ron shared that when he started, anyone in the bank who wanted to launch some sort of data project in the bank had to go through 97 different steps - 66 of them connected to governance (that's no longer the case).

Importantly, moving from legacy systems (the infamous COBOL) is needed, but not necessarily cheaper - telling CFOs that there isn't necessarily immediate financial ROI in legacy systems transformation (but crucial to being future-proof - many strategic initiatives with long term impact may not have that immediate ROI - like partnerships!).

When is a transformation project finished? According to Ron, the best transformations are the ones that NEVER stop - transformation isn't a one-and-done, but a mindset. 

Ron's vision for the future, specifically for Lloyd's digital transformation? "We'll know we succeeded when technology is a true differentiator". Keen to keep track where and how Ron leads!

As Laurens Hamerlinck summarized at a previous conference I attended - banks must "innovate or die".

Today was just one of those days!

On our way to school on our bikes, a car ran a red light and almost ran over my 6 year old daughter (she stopped on time and is shaken but fine).

Later today, riding to pick up my daughter from pool, the skies were mostly clear and blue - but my route was just under a rainy cloud - felt like a moment right out of a cartoon!

After calming my daughter in the morning, I shared what I believe to be possibly the most fundamental lesson I have learned over the years: we can't control what will happen to us in life, only how we choose to act.

Of course, I didn't implement this lesson when I was on the bike, soaking wet, by the time I arrived at the pool - it's so funny how easy it is to impart wisdom, and incredibly difficult to live by those same wise principles I teach my kids. So 

Just one of those days - and as I tell my wife when we're bummed about a mediocre parenting / work day - tomorrow is a new day. 

(The gifs are just for illustration, but the picture of the sky is actually what the sky looked like while biking and being rained on!).

Banking thoughts, sailing & ski

As I mentioned yesterday, I was at The Banking 50's event 2 weeks ago, and thought I'd share some additional interesting tidbits:

- When Max Geerling PhD described open banking, he mentioned a funny contradiction. Open Banking is tossed around a lot, when the original essence of a bank was to be not only closed - but difficult to access, locked! Obviously open banking isn't about opening that vault to just anyone, but I'm curious if better branding could have helped open banking adoption - or is it just a matter of time and trust. 

- Abdelhakim Benamara share the origin story of the ATM (Link to his post about it in the comments), sharing about BNP Paribas's activity and digital initiatives across Europe & the mediterranean. 

- I believe it was in Luc Brandts's talk about AI that I realized I was sub-consciously being super nice and polite to the AI tools I use, just to make sure I'm one of the humans they keep alive when they take control. Luc's analysis of how many AI systems' quality was rather poor reminded that it's crucial to look past the pretty UX of new AI systems, looking into system stability and accuracy (I'm far from an AI expert, and it's been 2 weeks, feel free to keep me honest here :) ) 

- Oleksii Popov's talk about using AI & ML to better segment banking customers, learning from existing bank data about the most relevant promotions and products relevant to client reminded me of all the irrelevant banking communications I received with the different banks I use, even though they have so much data about me! 

So, why sailing & ski? Merijn Olsthoorn, when speaking about his Gen AI project at ING, gave the analogy of sailing. When sailing with your family over the pacific, you plan how to keep your family safe - planning for every possible thing that can go wrong. I liked this analogy for innovation in banking, especially around AI - and experienced it in action when I took my family skiing!

Ok ok - enough for now or I'll endlessly ramble!

Banking feels stuffy some times, so I always make sure to stay connected to my inner child through my socks!

Going to MoneyLIVE today in London, these are the choices for today!

I’ll let you know what I ended up choosing 😇

I'm not as sophisticated with my dad jokes as Joe Fontana 🐘:

Helping my daughters wipe their little bottoms, I'll always enter the bathroom when I'm called for help, scrunch up my face, plug my nose and go "Whew, stinky!"

You should try it - really good way to gauge your kids' mood. You may get a tantrum to deal with, though - don't say I didn't warn ya!

#trolldad

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