Daniel Bathurst

The FCA's SMF17 approval clock runs 8-12 weeks. It starts the day you submit Form A — not the day you offer the candidate. Here's what most UK fintech founders don't realise until it's too late: 1/ A withdrawn MLRO application doesn't just cost   you the candidate. It costs you 10-12 weeks of   timeline. Not the FCA's fault. Yours, for not   pre-screening properly. 2/ "Senior banking experience" is not "sector   experience." A 20-year HSBC veteran can still   fail Fit & Proper for a stablecoin firm if the   FCA decides the permission scope doesn't match.   CV looks great. Decision is no. 3/ Form A is a one-shot document. One sloppy   declaration about a discharged bankruptcy parks   the application in supplementary-information   limbo for 6 weeks. 4/ Bankers don't read Form A. The FCA's   authorisation team does. Different audience,   different game. The mistake most fintechs make isn't picking the wrong candidate. It's running their MLRO search the same way they'd hire an engineer. The FCA is the second interview panel. The one that actually decides whether your hire ever starts. Building ActFast Resources specifically around solving this for UK fintech, RegTech and crypto. If your last SMF17 application got withdrawn — or your next one is making you nervous — my DMs are open. #Fintech #Compliance #FCA

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Spent yesterday afternoon at the Digital Assets Association Closed Door Forum. Three panels covered capital markets, tokenised cash, and FX moving onchain. Clear to spot signal from the room was that UK institutions are no longer asking whether onchain products work. They're asking when regulation will let them use those products at scale. The remaining question is whether policy can move fast enough to keep that activity here. Either way, I'm bullish on London and what this city can build Thanks to Otto Jacobsson and the Digital Assets Association UK team for hosting!

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Monzo just launched a credit card that turns spending into investing. Cashback is no longer just cashback. Meet Monzo Aura. Monzo says Aura is the UK’s first credit card that automatically invests your cashback as you spend. Customers can earn: → 1% cashback on groceries → 0.5% on everything else → Completely uncapped → Automatically invested through Monzo Investments It also includes: → 2 airport lounge passes → 2 airport fast-track passes → Apple TV → Google AI Plus with 2TB storage → Credit limits up to £15,000 → 0% interest for 3 months on purchases over £100 The card costs £15/month, while Monzo says the included partner perks are worth more than £360 per year. But the most interesting part for me is the bigger idea behind it. Credit card rewards traditionally encourage you to spend more to earn more. Monzo is trying to connect that same behaviour with long-term wealth building instead. A small product feature, but potentially a very interesting behavioural shift. Would you rather get your cashback paid out today or automatically invested for the future?

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Micropayments have been useless until now. Stablecoins made micropayments economically viable. But so far, the proposed use cases haven't made much sense. Ben Thompson makes this point on the Cheeky Pint podcast: for content creators, the micropayment model fails because each piece is a culmination of a body of work and can't be priced based on the content alone. Enter the x402 protocol. It's an open standard that lets any server advertise a price, accept a stablecoin payment inline with an HTTP request, and verify it automatically. No need for accounts, API keys, or billing setup. Combined with stablecoin-enabled wallets and the rise of AI agents, micropayments finally have both a real use case and a coordination layer. But treasury products are not set up to manage a stable of payment-enabled AI agents. With human vendors and employees, payment flows are relatively predictable and slow. You pay salaries twice a month, you pay vendors on net-30 terms, you have a small number of large transactions. Treasury management is built around that cadence. Agent payments break every assumption that treasury tooling is built on: Volume: One agent can make thousands of payments per day. A company running a large number of agents could generate more transactions in a week than its entire human vendor base generates in a year. Unpredictability: An agent's spend is dynamic. It makes more API calls when it's working harder, fewer when idle. You can't budget it the way you budget a SaaS subscription. Granularity: You need to know that Agent 12 spent $0.43 on data feeds, $1.20 on LLM calls, and $0.07 on storage yesterday. That's a reconciliation problem that doesn't exist today. Pre-funding requirement: Unlike a credit card, where you pay after the fact, agent wallets need to be funded in advance. So treasury now has a new job: making sure agent wallets don't run dry mid-task, without over-funding them and leaving idle capital sitting on-chain. The gap this creates: Every existing treasury product (Kyriba, Brex, Ramp, etc.) is built around human-initiated payments. None of them has agent wallet management, spending limits per agent, automatic top-ups, or on-chain reconciliation. Someone has to build that, and it's a natural wedge into the broader corporate treasury space. The company that makes it easy to manage agent spend alongside vendor payments and payroll has a chance of sticking around a bit longer.  

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The latest UK funding report shows investors backing domain-specific automation. Startupmag reports £98.9m raised across AI, biotech and fintech in the week of 7–11 September 2026. Xapien raised £41.43m to scale its AI due-diligence platform and international presence; CloudNC raised £14.77m to scale its CAM Assist software. The signal for founders is practical: funding is following repeatable commercial use cases, not just broad AI narratives. What matters most in this market: investor fit, proof of demand or international potential? https://lnkd.in/eSnjhZSv #InvestmentNews #VentureCapital #Startups

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Twenty years ago, if your business hit a cash squeeze, you dipped into your overdraft. It was familiar. It was flexible. And for most businesses, it worked. That product has become much harder to access. Bank of England data shows that overdrafts once represented a significant share of SME finance. Today, that share has reduced considerably. We put together a short breakdown of how this happened, what it means for UK SMEs, and why the landscape is starting to change.

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