The book Steve Jobs didn’t enjoy reading
In the spring of 1992, Steve Jobs stood in front of a lecture hall of MIT Sloan students and opened his talk not with a product demo, not with the NeXT story, but with someone else’s book. The full recording sits on MIT’s official YouTube channel, and about three and a half minutes in, Jobs […]
Open Finance Is Coming, Are Commercial Brokers Ready?
by Liz Syms, CEO, Connect for Intermediaries I recently had the opportunity to attend the FCA’s SME Finance Tech Sprint Showcase Day, focused specifically on SME lending innovation. It was one of those days that left me both energised and, I’ll be honest, a little concerned about how quickly the landscape is shifting and whether […]
AGI by 2030: Why the UK Mortgage Adviser Is Better Positioned Than You Think
By Liz Syms — Co founder of mortgagelab.ai, CEO of Connect for Intermediaries, Chair of the Society of Mortgage Professionals. I read the recent Aveni article about ‘Hazel’ which launched last month. Hazel is the AI advice platform launch that sent UK wealth management into a quiet panic. One line was really poignant. Joseph Twigg […]
Four British banks are helping build an AI model from scratch. That should make you curious.
Picture the sort of institutions that almost never agree on anything. HSBC. Lloyds. NatWest. The London Stock Exchange Group. Now picture them sitting around the same table, not to lobby a regulator or carve up a market, but to help design an artificial intelligence model. From the ground up. On British soil. That is roughly […]
The Rules Nobody Voted For
Every time you tap your card to pay for a coffee, you are trusting a rule that nobody in the queue could name. Not a law. A standard. A technical agreement, hammered out years ago in a committee room somewhere, that decided how the chip in your card talks to the reader on the counter. […]
The specialist lending forecast that might already need revising
Eighteen months ago, Together Money published a five-year outlook for the specialist lending market, built around analysis from Rob Thomas, a former Bank of England economist. It forecast total UK lending rising from £224bn to £315bn by 2029, a 41% gain. Specialist lending, the report predicted, would grow even faster, from £32bn to £54bn, a […]
When Google’s AI Chief Says Nobody Knows What Happens Next
Demis Hassabis published a manifesto this morning. The co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and by most measures the person closest to the frontier of artificial intelligence, set out his view on where the technology is heading and what ought to be done about it. The essay covers AGI timelines, […]
Who Owns Your Client by 2030?
The FCA has published the findings of the Mills Review. For anyone in financial services who hasn’t read it yet, I’d suggest making time. Buried inside the regulatory language is a question that should keep every mortgage intermediary in the country thinking: by 2030, who will control the primary customer relationship? The review, led by […]
Why AI Needs Mortgage Brokers More Than You Think
The FCA just published a document that describes a future where your client’s AI agent manages their mortgage, their savings, their insurance and their investments without them lifting a finger. It is called the Emerging Technology Horizon Scan 2026, it landed in June, and it is worth reading carefully. Not because it should worry you. […]
One in Three Sales Fall Through. The Government Finally Wants to Fix It.
Think about the last purchase that collapsed on you. The client who had waited months, the chain that held together right up until the week someone at the top decided they were not moving after all. You did everything right. The offer was sound, the case was packaged, the lender was ready. And it still […]