Sitting at the intersection of capital and founders, Silicon Valley Bank has a rare bird's-eye view of the innovation economy. In a year upended by COVID, remote working and looming Brexit, what does that vantage point actually reveal about the health and direction of UK and European tech?
Erin Platts, head of EMEA for SVB, walks through the trends shaping the ecosystem: record levels of venture investment, US capital flowing in as Zoom flattens geography, and a bifurcating market of fewer but better-capitalised rounds. She's candid about the gaps still to close, from domestic growth-stage capital and public listings to the perennial talent squeeze, and argues that diversity and inclusion must finally move from measurement to real accountability and action.
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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Turing Fest to what what feels like now essentially a TV show. So we're yeah. So just a few minutes ago, some of you will have been in a roundtable discussion with Val Geisler. I hope that was was great value for everyone.
If you missed Val's talk from last week, she did a really, really great talk about email marketing and customer retention, especially if you're in a SaaS company that's really well worth revisiting. And then earlier this week, we had three really pretty heavy hitting talks with Mark Logan on scale models, Chris Savage from Wistia on brand affinity marketing, and amplitudes, John Cutler walked us through the North Star framework, something that he's he's written about.
He's written a book about actually. So that's that's all well worth revisiting if you missed it. Just looking ahead to next week, we've got another author joining us actually. April Dunford, last year published a fantastic book about product positioning called Absolutely Awesome, which is a great name, I have to say.
Really recommend that and tune in for her. She's on Tuesday talking about product positioning, which is her thing. We've got Yara Paoli, who was formerly VP growth at Skyscanner, and she's gonna be talking about structuring your company for growth, which is Joanna Lord, who is currently actually the CMO at Skyscanner.
She spoke in TuringFest back in twenty eighteen, seventeen, seventeen maybe. Brilliant, brilliant talk, also worth revisiting. And this is almost like a maybe a part two of that. And then we have Amy Zima rejoining us. She also spoke with us in the past twenty eighteen, I think, and she's gonna be talking about product strategy and how she uses that in her day job with Spotify.
So tons to look forward to next week. But for today, we're going into our our interview session. We're gonna be joined shortly by Erin Platts, who is she's head of Europe for Silicon Valley Bank, who have been a partner Turing Fest since we started since twenty sixteen.
They've been a partner on our Turing Founders program, which some of you will know. I got to know Erin around then. Every time I meet her, she's getting promoted, they've put her at the top of the bank now. So I don't know where she's gonna go next.
But great to have her along. And as you'll see, Silicon Valley Bank's in a really interesting position at the intersection of capital coming into the into the innovation economy and founders and investors. So tons to discuss. So let's bring Erin in. Erin, you there?
I am. Hi, Brian. Hey. Good to see you. Good to I we kick kick off with just a little bit of background on you and on SVB, just for some context. Sure. Absolutely. So I, I head up the, EMEA business for SVB. I've been with the firm for, gosh, over sixteen years now.
Started in the US. I was in in Boston and New York and joined Southern Valley Bank in Boston in two thousand and four. And my roles have always been you know client facing, product led, working with innovation businesses. But I had the opportunity to move over to the UK in two thousand and seven with SCB and at that point we were a really small team on the ground really figuring out what could we potentially build locally in the UK.
What brand you know how would our brand resonate, what was happening on the ground. So it's been a really really incredible sort of ten, twelve years working with Silicon Valley Bank and seeing not just our business grow, we're now about four hundred people across five countries, but more importantly seeing the whole ecosystem grow and thrive.
One of the questions I had when I first moved over to the UK back in two thousand and seven is, you know, how big could this market get? You know, coming from the US, which is obviously really, really mature in terms of tech, that was a question mark.
But I think we've answered that question pretty robustly and it's just been phenomenal to see you know the quality of the companies, the amount of capital, the momentum. So my role as head of EMEA, again, we've got four hundred people, around three thousand clients.
And at SVB, we are the only commercial bank across Europe focused exclusively on innovation. So that's working with everything from super early stage startup through to public and private corporates and the venture capital and and private equity funds that invest in innovation and outside of it.
So to talk a little bit more about what we do and how we do it, but that's, Silicon Valley Bank in a in a nutshell. Yeah. I love the I love the broad strokes of the business model where you you know, on on the one side, you've got the the funders, and they've got their money with the bank, and then they invest it in the of the startups, and those startups end up with the bank.
And then as the startups grow, you know, you're you're getting the best of all worlds. It's a it's a nice place to be. But like you say, great to see how much the tech sector is growing, and and that's I guess that's kinda why we're all here.
What's Thank also what your TuringFest is kind of about. So this year has been, you know, a bonkers year for all of us. How has it been how many people do you normally have in your London office? So we are about two hundred two hundred and seventy five of the four hundred are based in in London.
Okay. So I think, you know, when when when March, April, when the whole COVID situation starts to unfold, you know, lots of startups, I mean, literally picked up their laptops and just started instead of going to the office, they were just working from home, and that was a a minimal minimal transition.
And then lots of corporates have really struggled with it for lots of different reasons culturally and some of the tech that they use, etcetera. And you guys are this sort of strange organization in some ways. Like, anytime I'm at the bank down in London, you it it just doesn't.
It feels feel more like a a well funded startup than you do like a bank. So how has that how has that been for for you as an organization? Yeah. I have to I'll I'll take that as a compliment. I mean, the last thing that I wanna be doing is building a big big slow bank.
We need to try to keep up with our clients as best we can. Yeah, you know I have to say I was blown away by the team. So like many companies, when we needed to go into lockdown within you know within forty eight hours we mobilized our you know two seventy five people which in the UK we're a full commercial bank.
We've got a full FX trading desk. And again, within forty eight hours, we completely mobilized. Every single person is now working from home with the exception of handful. So Touchwood, it was a really, really seamless transition that allowed us to really focus on taking care of our clients and taking care of each other and our employees, right?
It was a, looking back, a pretty crazy time for everyone and the demand for Silicon Valley Bank and for our employees from our clients just mushroomed. So to be able to have the infrastructure and the seamless transition to working from home to really focus on taking care of our clients and our employees was really really important.
Now that came with lots of previous preparation around BCP and all the things that you would expect a bank in a big company to be be managing, but it was nice to see that BCP plan that was in the drawer for a couple of years actually come to life and work.
So since then we've been you know like many other companies big and small focused on the new normal, focused optimizing, working remotely, and figuring out new and different ways to connect with our clients and partners and each other. And how do you how do you think the team is is feeling about it?
Like, when you know, let's say it's March, April of next year or June, July, or whenever it turns out to be, and it's like, okay. You know, we can all go back to our offices, etcetera. Is everyone gonna be happy to go back to the office?
Is are people gonna miss working from home? Is there gonna be some new kinda hybrid arrangement, do you think? And what about for you personally? Yeah. I mean, we're we're already planning the welcome back party. I think, the great thing about SVB and, you know, the community that we work in is people genuinely like to see each other and work together.
But what this has proven is that there is no need for, for Silicon Valley Bank or frankly many companies to need to be a hundred percent in the office all the time. So there is an expectation that we'll continue to offer maximum flexibility to our employees.
So we're working on again two things tactically how do we optimize the situation that we're in Because I think it's going to probably continue on for the next couple of months or quarters. But then secondly what is that future of work? What's the purpose of an office?
How do we figure out, especially in a business like ours where we've got some parts of our employee base that should be out client facing, in the market, running around, meeting new people, connecting people, being conveners of an ecosystem, and others that are very much I would say desk bound in terms of payment processing, you know AML, KYC, risk colleagues.
So what's the right combination of support that those two very different groups need? And where we're landing is the office should be hopefully over time a place where people can convene. What I'm missing besides the energy of seeing the team and our clients is those informal conversations.
So for us I've seen across our business productivity and efficiency massively go up, especially in the beginning of working from home. And I'm starting to see that flatten out and actually in some areas effectiveness starting to drop because of that informal connectivity and communication that you just don't get being one hundred percent remote.
So I'm hopeful that the work that we're doing around the future work and using our office in a more deliberate way to create those informal communications, those brainstorming, those drop ins, that creative time, that's probably where we'll end up as a company. But it's you know it's something that we're figuring out in real time.
And we're also trying to crowdsource, right, with our clients and figure out what the best some good options are. But, personally, I think we can get back. Yeah. Yeah. I think we all we all miss we miss people. We miss each other. And it kinda it definitely feels like an unnatural state that we're in at the moment where we're all sort of apart from each other.
Although, I guess, probably in in we're not as we're not in as rough a situation as a lot of people. So on the crowdsourcing thing and and speak go on. Oh, sorry. Think what I won't miss is the sheer amount of travel. I I'm hopeful that I won't have to go back to level of travel that we're doing, and we can continue to utilize things like Zoom and other collaboration tools.
And but we'll we'll see. We'll see what bad habits we get into, how quickly it takes us to revert back to to those bad habits. Yeah. There's some there's lots of interesting stats kicking around. I think it was Bill Gates came out this week, and he said he thinks business travel is gonna drop by fifty percent.
And then I saw quite a lot of pushback again against that by people saying no. You know, some of the research suggests between ten and fifteen percent drop in business travel. I don't know. All of those, like, flying into New York for to meet one person and that kind of stuff.
I think that's all probably gonna be harder to justify, especially for for start ups, obviously. You mentioned crowdsourcing from from your from your your clients. And so your your clients are essentially, I guess, the majority of UK or a lot of the a lot of companies across Europe that have raised raised some institutional money.
So you see you're connected to some of the most interesting and innovative companies across the continent. What what are you seeing from them around how their how they've adapted to what twenty twenty's thrown at us, what they're thinking about for next year, or how their cultures have shifted, things like that.
Yeah. I would say there's the, I guess, the operational side, and then there's the more, team team side and and culture and value side. And on the operational side, I mean, what we saw in in March and April was you know a lot of companies, investors were in triage mode.
And so many many companies were taking out costs, utilizing the government schemes, raising inside rounds. We saw an abundance of investment activity in terms of inside rounds, companies drawing on their debt facilities, and we've just released a Q4 state of the market report and what we're seeing on average again across our portfolio that we survey, and we've got about thirty thousand innovation companies that bank with us globally.
So we've got a pretty good bird's eye view. In the US about fifty percent market share of venture backed businesses, sixty five market share of funds investing in innovation. And across the board the runway that our portfolio is sitting on is about twenty four months.
So these companies now really preparing for I guess, market disruption. But it's starting to feel like we're kind of getting into a bit of a business as usual. A lot of our companies are have really really increased, similar to us, employee proposition, employee well-being, internal communication, right?
We had to all collectively find, except for those few proportion of companies that were completely remote, different ways of motivating, of attracting and retaining talent, onboarding, communicating. At SVB we've hired in EMEA almost seventy people since lockdown began, so we've had to really quite quickly change the way we are attracting, retaining, onboarding, orienting talent.
Some things outside of the operational side that I talked about, you know there's just so much conversation happening around mental health and well-being. We had the founder and CEO of one of our clients come speak to our office today remotely, Doctor. Nick Taylor from Unmind, and that's a mental health and well-being workplace platform.
And so we're really starting to see a lot more discussion activity crowdsourcing around how do we keep people motivated, taking care of themselves in this, what you were saying before, unnatural environment. It's definitely, I hope it's going to be one of the positives that comes out of all this is that there's much more awareness on mental health.
We've had a Turing Fest the last two years in a row. I think we've had some talks about mental health. And we had Doctor. Emily Anhalt. If you ever get a chance to see speak to her, by the way, she's tremendous. She's just she's a co founder of a company in in the Bay Area that called Coa, building mental health gyms for the mind.
But she's a brilliant speaker, really, really cool person. On the on the investment landscape, so when when you know, if we go if we roll back to April, like you were saying, people are triaging, etcetera, and one of the big predictions was investments VC investment was basically gonna go on hold, that investors were gonna look to back their portfolios, people you know, top up when in invest in companies that were already in, but not to any new rounds.
And then it seemed like by kind of May, certainly June, everything had kinda snapped back into this new almost accelerated scenario because instead of having to physically fly around the place to meet everybody, everything was just happening on Zoom. And so it seems like investment rounds have sped up.
Yeah. I think you're right. I think we saw just, again, a ton of inside round activity April, May, and into and into June. And then it felt like there was kind of a sea change and the last couple of months has just been tremendous in terms of the amount of activity.
European Venture is on track to meet Earthsea twenty nineteen which is a record year in and of itself. Q3 was over ten billion of investment, ten billion euros of investment in the quarter alone which is you know only I think the third time that we've seen over ten billion of investment per quarter.
So absolutely I mean there is a lot of capital available. I think the other thing that we've continued to see is the zoom effect has really leveled the playing field from a geographic perspective. So this year is the highest proportion of U. S.
Investment into Europe, you know three quarters year to date than we've ever seen. So you know Zoom has created a lot of opportunity. It's also created some competition locally for capital. But there is plenty of money, whether that be VC, PE or corporate capital sitting on the sidelines.
And so I anticipate we'll continue to see a really strong investment landscape going into twenty twenty one. Now that being said, I think COVID has created a pretty substantial bifurcation in the market. So fewer rounds well this is a trend we saw twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen as well, but fewer rounds better capitalized businesses that has been exacerbated I think by COVID where people are taking you know big bets on some breakaway companies.
But I also think we'll see on the other side of the coin going into twenty twenty one particularly for companies that are you know q4 seasonal or potentially enterprise software which has enjoyed really really strong growth capital valuations. But it'll be interesting to see you know from a Q4 Q1 renewals how much churn there actually is in some of these SaaS companies and enterprise software companies.
What actually is mission critical software? I think we've potentially lulled ourselves into a false sense of security, but we'll see. I hope I'm wrong, but I anticipate some challenges over the next couple of quarters for certain parts of the market. But by and large, you know, we're gonna I think we're gonna continue to see up into the right investment activity.
Yeah. Yeah. That that seems like it makes a lot of sense. You mentioned about the the shifts in the venture market and geography being not maybe eliminated as a as a a factor, but certainly diminished. And we it it like we've seen at both ends of the venture market, we've seen lots more kinda micro funds emerging, and we're starting to see bigger bigger raises from some of the established players in Europe, plus the US funds increasingly looking at at the European market.
How do you think all of that is gonna is gonna play out? I mean, it's a good time for founders to be raising capital, right, despite pandemics and other challenges. Yeah. It it is it is unbelievable with the headwinds that we've got going on, how robust and resilient this this sector has been.
I would say there's the domestically, locally, a UK and European perspective, we've done an amazing job building out the seed, early stage series A, series B fund sources of capital. Even this year twenty twenty there's been a lot of new funds raised so that we haven't really seen a slowdown.
In actual fact we've seen an increase in new fund formation at the emerging manager level and beyond. So really good signals for the next couple of years. There's three areas that I think as an ecosystem we need to continue to think about how we support and drive domestic capital.
And those three are kind of LPs, LP activity investment, UK and European LPs investing into local funds. The second is the growth equity spectrum, Series C and beyond, Again, where we're really reliant upon external sources of capital, mainly US to lead or at least substantially participate in some of these very, very late stage growth, large growth rounds.
And the third is kind of our public market and making finding ways to ensure that we're retaining talent that we are it's an option to list here as opposed to going externally to list when the time is right for your company. And I'm hopeful that the combination of those three things will result in, you know, in a continued acceleration and momentum for UK and European tech.
And again, if I reflect back the last ten years, we didn't always have such a robust and healthy early stage venture capital and seed and angel ecosystem. It takes time to develop. So I think it's natural where we are, but it's something I do think as an ecosystem we need to continue to address.
That said, I don't think it's a bad thing to continue to attract global capital for our companies here. It's great to see you know some of the US players that have been circling around you know actually writing checks and of course increasingly putting people on the ground.
So it's a great sign for the quality of companies that we're creating here, building here, scaling here. But I don't think it's the finished package if you will. There's still some room to grow in some areas that I think we need to deliberately invest in to make sure the next five to ten years, it continues with the the great momentum that we have today.
Yeah. Yeah. It it's definitely, it's been interesting to I think if you looked at all the trends in tech in in the UK and all across Europe, like, everything is probably in a better position than it was five years ago. We're we're it's all definitely kinda growing.
Capital was maybe a a big, constraint on on European companies in the past, less so now. But access to skills and access to to talented people and experienced talented people seems to be that seems to be a problem that's just, you know well, it seems to be a problem that never goes away.
You know, it's a problem in the valley, in Boston, Seattle, wherever. But it definitely it's definitely something that's affecting companies in the UK, and it feels like it's gonna get more tricky with Brexit just around the corner. How do how do you think how how do you see the outlook for attracting talented people into the UK and the the reputation, I guess, generally for the UK over the next little while?
So I think you hit the nail on the head. Whenever we talk to our clients globally, and we do at SCB a startup outlook survey every year and every year for the past twelve years access to talent is the number one issue raised by our clients globally.
So it's not just a UK or European issue though obviously with Brexit looming it's something that we really really need to address. I would say on the positive side the momentum here, the access to capital, the talent that we have coming out of universities, the fact that we're starting scaling growing global category leaders, we're already on the map.
And you know speaking to some colleagues in the US, there is an increased awareness and excitement of what's going on here locally, not just from the investors but from the talent that exists within US companies thinking, okay well there's something great happening in the UK and Europe.
There's obviously some things going on in the US from a macro perspective that, you know, a lot of noise. So I do think that there's an ability over the next couple of years to continue to attract talent, again, whether that be from the US, Asia, elsewhere.
One of the things that I'm really conscious of is the narrative around Brexit, the narrative around what's happening here locally with respect to COVID or the economy. I think we need a stronger collective voice shouting from the rooftops about what a great place the UK and Europe is to start scale scale companies.
Despite the what ends up happening with Brexit, deal or no deal, we work with the most agile, nimble, ambitious companies across the economy that will make a success of it regardless. Obviously, the access to talent, making sure that we can attract talent globally needs to be solved.
I I think today there was an announcement from Tech Nation around, additional visa program, which is a step in the right direction, but it needs to be more programmatic and we really, really need to shout from the rooftops about what's happening locally and get ahead of some of the ambiguity that exists with respect to Brexit and COVID.
You know, because people from an outside looking in, you know, we get asked that question all the time from our US and Asian investors that we work with wondering what's happening locally. And I don't think we're talking about it enough. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed on that.
I think there's a dawning understanding at, or or maybe a belated understanding at government level about how important the tech sector is and how much of the economy is gonna be built on it in the decade or two. But they're you know, we're getting there.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about, how you think the diversity and inclusion landscape is shaping up. If you a little bit maybe like capital and and talent, you know, we're it's getting better, but we're we still have a long way to go.
But from your own perspective, like, when you started out, I think you said was it fifteen, sixteen years ago you started SVB? You have got to the top of a a bank across Europe, which is probably pretty rare in the in the banking industry to have a young woman running a a a pan European bank.
How has that how has that landscape changed? For example, we see a lot more women VC now than we did even four or five years ago. I mean, like, it felt like Aileen Burbidge was on every stage at every conference in the world for a while.
And she, you know, she was really flying the flag. But now, you know, Sid Tartelli, Sanna de Raiker, Ophelia Brown, Reshma Sony, there's tons now, which is is definitely a really good shift. But from a founder perspective, it feels like definitely that's still we have a long way to go there.
How how do you look see all of that, you know, within the finance sector, within the startup sector? Yeah. I mean, I've I've had a unique view of sitting in the intersection between finance and innovation you know over the last sixteen, seventeen years and yeah I mean I can tell you one of the hardest things for me over the last ten years of building my career locally in the UK finance sector is it was building peer based relationships, Walking into a networking event in banking, you know it was rare to find
many women and rare to find women under a certain age. And so I kind of stuck out a bit. And so I chose to build my network outside of banking and finance and more focused on innovation, which I think has served me and us well in that again what we don't want to do is build yet another bank.
We want to make sure that what we're building our cultures and values align with the clients that we serve. So there's a lot of good stuff happening right. I think the conversation has completely changed in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion. Now I think what we need to do rapidly is move from conversing about it and measuring.
I think we've done a much better job measuring actually what's the state of play with respect to innovation, venture capital, and private equity. So we partnered with people like Diverse BDC. Atomico is releasing a report on the eighth of December which is going to have some great data with respect to DE and I for our industry.
Andy Davis at 10x10 issuing the black report. So I think right now as an ecosystem, like we've got more data and visibility than we've ever had before. We've got the right level of conversation, but now it's about action and accountability. And I think that's the shift that I think we're ready for, but we kind of need to jump in create measurable change.
So you know we're talking to a number of internal and external partners about some ideas that we have around, you know, how we can better face off to market, how we can better provide tools for diverse founders that maybe wouldn't hit the radar of certain angels or investors just yet.
We've launched an access to innovation program. One of our main partners there is a charity called Career Ready. It's a social mobility charity, and effectively it's trying to get young people into work. And our vision for that partnership and our access to innovation partnership is, or our access innovation program is how do we get these young people in?
A lot of the times what we hear from our clients that are fast growth, they are trying to build these incredible businesses. They're trying to attract talent at a crazy rate. And they just, know, don't have the time to get interns or get apprentices in.
So our vision is, well, we'll do that. We'll get in this diverse talent. We will train it up, train them up. We will provide them with access then to Silicon Valley Bank, but then access to the funds and the companies that we work with and try to create this talent of pipeline in that way.
I guess the other thing I'd say is we can't just wait for the next generation of talent. I think as a industry we have so much to offer in terms of innovation And there's a lot of diverse talent that are working in other industries that we need to welcome into tech.
We need to be much more inclusive and proactive in trying to attract diverse talent into innovation. And do a little bit of marketing, right? Not everyone needs to have a degree in engineering to have a successful career in technology. So there are plenty of opportunities for us to attract talent from diverse industries, but we need to be deliberate and proactive about it.
So very long winded way of saying I think that there's great momentum, but there's so so much more that we need to do. We really need to drive results and accountability to make sure that we, get the success that we all want and and expect.
Yeah. I I agree with you. And it is it is incumbent on everybody who's in a position to to kind of effect change to sort of drive towards that. I mean, something that we've done at at TuringFest in the last few years, we have a a pretty substantial volunteer crew that helps out at the conference every year.
Not this year, obviously. But we normally have, you know, a hundred or so students. And they're student university students from around Edinburgh. But to be honest, we could probably do a lot more by getting school kids involved and getting kids from colleges rather than just, you know, the four universities in the city.
So, yeah, there's lots of ways I think we can all we can all play a role there. And I I I but I do agree that it it's definitely it's on the agenda. I guess that's a big change from even five years ago.
So we're definitely we're making slow progress, but going to the right direction. Yeah. Maybe even, like, three it feels like the last two or three years, it's been a pretty notable shift. And I do think to your earlier point, the more diversity that exists within the the sources of capital, I believe the more that's gonna make its way into into into founding companies.
And one of the things that we launched, I just want to mention it because I think it's a really interesting program, it was started by Alejandro Guerrero, Act One Ventures, is the diversity term sheet writer and effectively it's this template boilerplate language that a number of investors have signed up for SCB, SCB Capital being one, Greycroft, First Round, and effectively it's this language that's put it's, as standard into term sheets that's creating access for diverse investors into rounds.
And so that's a really great actionable way to ensure that you know some of these individuals that just don't have access to some of these high profile opportunities get access. And then it will build partnerships. It will build relationships. It'll build exposure. Hopefully, it'll build some success, and and, again, that flywheel will will turn.
So I think there's, tactical things that we could do to more quickly move the needle. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. That that sounds like a great program. There's two two things I wanna touch on briefly before we wrap up. One, we'll get to in a second is rising stars, any companies that you have an eye on that you think are are really going places.
But the other one is is fintech. And it feels like the UK has and certainly London has a lot of eggs in the fintechs basket. And we've seen there's been a ton of hype. I don't know where the hype versus reality kind of where where that falls.
But one thing I did wanna ask about was was challenger banks and neobanks. How how hard is it for them? Or how realistic is it to expect that they can compete against, you know, established hundred year old banks? Yeah. I so on fintech, generally, I mean, it's such a broad term, right?
It includes everything from payments and remittance and challenger banks and regtech and insuretech. So I am really bullish, but I think when we talk about fintech you gotta double click and and because each sub sector they're probably a slightly different story. But on your question around challenger banks, so we you know at FTB we are a commercial bank, so we're not in many respects.
A lot of the challenger banks who started retail, they started single product, single proposition and are now trying to expand into multi revenue streams. That's difficult and made even more difficult by COVID, right? And that's why we've seen I think some you know pretty well documented challenges around valuations.
Now if you are being valued on growth and COVID hits and you're a really capital intensive business that's a difficult combination to weather. And running a full service bank through this regulatory environment is tough and it's really, really expensive. That being said, fundamentally the experience that a lot of the challenger banks offer around onboarding, UI, UX, digital experience, pace, nimbleness, agility, there is something that I believe will remain and that will actually in certain areas I guess be successful with respect to traditional banks.
I think there's room for both, but I think the single product, single use case is a really really difficult business model. And if you look at, you know, maybe taking a different example, you look at TransferWise, they started as a single product company and actually expanded and then backed into banking as opposed to the other way around.
I think that model is incredibly interesting. I really admire what they've done. So I think that from a challenger bank, new bank perspective it's going to be a really difficult twelve to twenty four months. I think we'll see some challenger banks struggle but there is sufficient room within the market and there's sufficient demand from a consumer perspective to have a better, more robust experience.
So time will tell, but it's a pretty difficult place to be for many at the moment, again, given that combination of growth being constrained and having, you know, some pretty substantial fixed costs that are much harder to tweak given you've gotta remain compliant, you've gotta set aside capital, even if you've not seen the growth rates that you would have anticipated historically.
I guess we'll we'll know when some of those challenger banks have been successful, when they get acquired by some of the people they were supposed to disrupt. Well, you know, I that was gonna that was gonna be another point, which is I think twenty twenty one, in, you know, fintech generally actually, across the board, I think we're gonna see a pretty substantial uptick in in m and a.
Now whether that dictates success or not depends on on the valuation at the end of the day. But I do think we'll see some consolidation, over the next twelve months for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Just on the rising stars question then to wrap up, any not not necessary I mean, if there are companies that that you you think are particularly exciting, but also sectors that you you see your, you know, your clients, the investor side, or or coming in through your startup programs where things are looking looking interesting.
Yeah. There's a few sectors that jump to mind. Know health tech generally has seen a huge amount of momentum. I think the stats are since twenty fifteen there's two point eight billion raised and invested in sector of which a billion has to come year to date.
So there's huge huge momentum. I mentioned Unmind, the workplace mental health platform which I think is super interesting. I'm still, and maybe this is the banker in me, incredibly excited about RegTech. I've been excited about it for the past five plus years. It's wonderful to see companies like Onfido and Comply Advantage and Finurgo really go from strength to strength.
I think there's a ton more innovation that needs to happen in that space. If there's any company solving the B2B KYC onboarding journey, please do reach out. It's complex, it's hard, but I think there's a huge opportunity there. You know, I think the great news is we're kind of seeing innovation continue across the board and that has been a step change over the last five to seven years in terms of the UK and European landscape, right?
We're creating not just great fintech or consumer businesses, it's fintech, it's consumer, it's digital health, it's biotech, it's fintech. So you know we and me personally, I'm really really bullish for the next kind of five plus years to come. There's no place I'd rather be than working with you know innovation businesses in the UK and Europe.
So definitely some headwinds, but I think we'll emerge even stronger than where we started last year. Okay. That's a pretty optimistic note, so maybe we'll we'll we'll wrap it up there. That's and we've we've probably run a little bit over our time. So, Erin, thanks very much for being with us today.
And also thanks for Silicon Valley Bank support at Turing Fast for the you know, since twenty sixteen. Long may continue, and, it's very much appreciated. Absolutely. Our pleasure. Thanks, Brian. Okay. Take care. I'll see you soon. Okay. That wraps up today and and this week's this week's Turing Fest.
All as ever, all the videos are available on on the platform. If you and obviously, nobody's tuning in for everything. We're all in this sort of odd world where managing time is a whole new new challenge relative to to before. So the ones that you miss, head back in to check them out.
There's been actually, I think the content of this year's conference has been really exceptional, And it's I I have to take my hat off to the speakers because for them, this has been a hard scenario. Normally, when you're on stage giving a presentation, you get a lot of feedback from the audience.
And that's for a lot of speakers, that's really important and helps them kinda guide their presentation. None of that this year, obviously. So they've all been doing a great job, so hats off to them. We're into next week, we're back with a bunch more talks that I mentioned.
And there's gonna be I think, Eisethel are gonna be running a, a quiz next week as well, so we'll keep an eye out for that. But that's it for today, and we'll drop you a note to recap and keep everyone posted on what's going on.
So thanks as ever to our partners, to Amazon Dev Center, to Deliveroo, Mailchimp, and, of course, Current Health. Take care. Bye bye.
