Fnality’s ways of working, based on the agile methodology, mean that we are constantly iterating, feeding back and learning. For our team members, in a practical sense that means that we encourage open and honest feedback, and encourage everyone to develop not just themselves, but also others; introspect and be empowered to make suggestions based on your findings. One way we do this is through our fortnightly sprint retrospectives, where, as part of a cross-functional team, we each discuss what went well and what could have gone better in the previous two-week sprint. This can range from talking about a piece of work not going according to plan, deadlines not being reached, morale being...

Traditionally, the functions of financial market infrastructure (which includes payment systems) have been centrally administered and operated by a single entity. There is a growing movement within the wholesale financial market towards decentralisation in order to reduce reliance on centralised intermediaries and “unlock billions in capital and liquidity”. Decentralisation is at the core of our design principles at Fnality. Both the technology underpinning the Fnality Payment System (‘FnPS’) and our organisational design are based on the concept of decentralisation. There will be no ‘single point of failure’ should a server go down or ‘single point of attack’ from malicious actors...

When the Covid Lockdown hit early last year, life seemingly came to a standstill. In that period of calm, my husband and I vowed to express to each other 5 things we felt grateful for every morning before work. Little did I know, that soon after that quiet period and by the end of that year, we would find ourselves moving overseas to the UK from South Africa.

At the start of this year, I wrote a post speculating that 2021 may be the year of dFMI. Happily, there has been some significant progress on this front, such as the creation of an Omnibus Account Structure by the Bank of England and a clarification of the usage of ECB technical accounts paving the way for pre-funded payment systems. However, nearly three quarters of the way through the year, I admit I may have missed an important stage of evolution: the speed of stablecoin acceptance!

Since the pandemic began you would have read several articles on how our personal and work lives have changed and adapted as we’ve moved online. Instead of face-to-face interaction we have been accustomed to using collaboration tools such as Zoom, Slack and WebEx.

It’s been a while since a former British Lord Chancellor declared “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts”, striking a populist note in the lead up to the UK’s Brexit referendum.  In Watching the English, an entertaining book recommended to me when I first immigrated to this country, anthropologist Kate Fox writes about the English having “vestigial traces of a ‘culture of amateurism’, involving an instinctive mistrust of professionalism”.  Others have argued about the superiority of generalists in a highly specialised world.1   

In a recent conversation with Fnality’s CEO, Rhom, he recommended that I should be kinder to myself. I’ve heard it before. In fact, I’ve been hearing this repeatedly since the early days of my career. I would normally do something nice, like a longer weekend, or taking a long bath. However, having investigated this concept recently, I realised that it is not just about doing something nice for yourself; it is about the way you treat yourself, and how you use your inner voice. If you are a person who often says “I am my own worst critic” or hears “don’t be too hard on yourself” the chances are that you may not be very good at being kind to yourself. Many of us are not aware of the...

Recently, the Fnality ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) Community of Practice organised a live Q&A session with Meghan Foreman-Purves, Head of Legal, Europe for CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce). It was a session that all of us at Fnality found insightful and inspiring, so we are delighted to share Meghan's experiences and advice around topics such as leadership, overcoming career obstacles, and parenthood in the workplace with a broader audience in this blog post.

Meghan was, until very recently, a Director of CIBC’s UK regulated subsidiary, and has recently been welcomed to the Fnality Community as CIBC’s Board Observer and Shareholder Representative.