The Labour Party recognises fintech as one of the “jewels in the UK PLC crown”, according to the boss of Europe’s leading listed VC fund.
Tim Levene, CEO, Augmentum Fintech, which backs UK challenger bank Monese, UK SME lender Iwoca and German tech rental platform Grover, said:
“Everything that Labour has talked about in terms of the UK fintech industry, they recognise that it is one of the jewels in the UK PLC crown.”
His comments come amid expectation that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party will win next week’s general election.
Levene continued:
“There have been a lot of good things that have happened over the last decade and I think why would you look to change something that is built from a very good base?
“Everything that we have heard has been very encouraging, that they want to support the industry, they want to champion growth and innovation and I think that is everything the UK fintech industry is trying to do.
“I hope it will be business as usual.”
Levene was speaking as Augmentum Fintech reported a 3.1% increase in its net asset value before performance fees, rising to £303.3m in the year ending March 31 2024, from £294.1m the year previous.
The London-listed firm said the value of the investment portfolio grew to £265.1m in the year ending 31 March, from £254.3m a year earlier.
Augmentum Fintech also announced it had made a £2.6 million investment in London-based FX trading platform LoopFX.
Levene said its founder and CEO Blair Hawthorne was one of the “most impressive” founders he’d met in recent years.
Levene said Hawthroe had a “clear vision”, “deep domain expertise” and knew the challenges first-hand.
On Augmentum’s investment in the capital market space, Levene said the opportunity was “significant”.
He said:
“Fundamentally when you are investing in capital markets businesses you are much more reliant on incumbents because ultimately they are going to be your end customers in many respects.
“We have a long-held thesis that the institutional foreign exchange market is inefficient in many respects and lacks digitisation.
‘I think if you look across the sphere, there is a long way to go in capital markets. We can cherry-pick a lot of asset classes that continue to suffer from a lack of transparency, a lack of digitisation.”
He says the market is now “much more receptive” to propositions like LoopFX than it was five years ago.
