Excellent post, as mentioned it would be easy to acquire the necessary talent pool in London. However, just starting out on the tech platform would have a significant price tag attached which means funding would be necessary even without a MVP....hard if not impossible to find

The Twitter conversation that led to that post started with me pointing out that VCs "don't fund NASA [i.e. large up-front cost] projects these days. They fund little consumer startups with traction" - https://twitter.com/JackGavigan/status/432633513666281472 - and cited retail banking as an example - https://twitter.com/JackGavigan/status/432644947485802497

Automated functions, like storing money, transfers, (digital?) check processing, buying indices - all on explicit commands and with fees - even storing money - but dirt cheap.

After that we can talk about less clear-cut functions, like various kinds of investments or loan offerings.

I would ignore checks. Here in the UK, they're hardly used anymore.

This was my rejected idea for Ycombinator. I still think there's a lot of potential in this space, very similar to Simple.

Me too! What a coincidence! Oh... wait