It’s Christmas day. Saint Nick is putting the final touches on his famous annual list – and checking it twice. In the interest of giving a hand to the Christmas Plc chief executive, UKTN has looked back at the good and bad behaviour across the British tech industry in 2024.
So, which figures in UK tech will be celebrating a well-procured wishlist courtesy of Father Christmas and which will wake up on the 25th to a lump of coal?
Naughty – Kristo Käärman, CEO, Wise
It would be fair to say that Wise has had a massive positive impact on the UK fintech and global fintech space as an early innovator in cross-border payments.
It would also, however, be easier to applaud the company’s influence if its co-founder and CEO didn’t so regularly find himself at the wrong end of Britain’s financial regulators.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) handed Käärmann a £350,000 fine in October for breaching a senior manager conduct rule.
The fintech boss was reprimanded for not disclosing to the FCA previous regulatory breaches during its assessment of his fitness and propriety.
According to the regulator, Käärmann did not properly consider the significance of an earlier run-in with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) during its assessment of him.
He was fined £365,651 in 2021 for deliberately failing to notify HMRC of a capital gains liability following his sale of £10m worth of shares in 2017.
This issue was apparently not addressed by Käärmann when he was cooperating with the FCA’s investigation.
Nice – Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
Alongside the rapid rise of generative AI models has been a furious debate concerning the level to which these powerful tools should be “open”.
Meta, for example, has been flying the flag of open source in AI, with its president of global affairs and former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg warning the technology cannot be “kept in the clammy hands of a small number of very, very large and well-heeled companies in California”.
Other big players have been less bullish on the concept of transparency but throughout the endless arguments, Brock in her role as head of the UK’s open-source trade body has been fervently demanding that the technology remain open.
I spoke with Brock several times this year about the topic, and in those conversations, she went beyond simply calling for the technology to be nominally open, instead, she demanded that the very concept of “openness” should not compromised by companies using the name without meeting the requirements. Brock and her team have been routinely calling out this idea of “open washing”– the misleading use of terms such as open source in cases where the definition is not met – and demanding legislators bear this risk in mind.
Naughty – Scott Timlin (Scotty T), reality TV star
As a reality TV star known for his appearances on The Geordie Shore and Celebrity Big Brother, you may be confused as to why Timlin has been placed in a list about the tech industry, an area he seemingly has no connection to or expertise in.
Well, if a lack of connection to the world of tech and finance wasn’t enough to prevent Timlin from advertising high-risk investments to his hundreds of thousands of followers on social media – alongside irritating topless gym pics – then it won’t be enough to stop me from including him on my tech rotters list.
Timlin was brought to court this year alongside several other social media personalities by the FCA. He was accused of promoting an Instagram account that was advertising contracts for difference (CFD) investments with no authorisation to potentially vulnerable followers – he pleaded not guilty.
Plenty of pseudo-celebrities have found themselves gleefully accepting promotional deals from advertisers, but Timlin took it further.
UKTN reported in October that despite Timlin facing ongoing legal action regarding his unauthorised financial promotions, he was actively endorsing crypto investments via a Telegram group called Scotty T’s Crypto Reviews.
That link no longer appears in the bio of Timlin’s Facebook page. But fear not, for those on the hunt for ill-advised crypto investments endorsed by a former participant of MTV UK’s Ex on the Beach, he now appears to be directing his 473,000 followers to an NFT venture in the cannabis industry.
Nice – Ed Newton-Rex, CEO, Fairly Trained
In the conversation on the openness of the AI industry, London’s Stability AI has been playing something of a controversial role.
The unicorn, which competes with firms like OpenAI with an image and video-making chatbot, has firmly stated its position that any available content, whether it is copyrighted or not, should be considered up for grabs for training AI models.
Stability has argued that tearing up the work of others and stitching it together should legally come under fair use protections that allow for the unlicensed use of copyrighted material if the result is ‘transformative’.
This approach has left Stability facing a lawsuit from Getty Images, but it also notably prompted a mass exit of senior employees, including, Newton-Rex.
The former VP of audio left the company in 2023 in protest of its use of copyrighted material to train its AI.
This year, Newton-Rex launched Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies generative AI companies that deploy “fairer training data practices”.
Essentially, the group exists to verify that when AI companies train their models on the work of humans, they do so with permission, with successful models receiving a Fairly Trained certification.
As the generative AI industry matures, there will be plenty of legal challenges and debates over what can be considered fair, so figures like Newton-Rex will be needed to ensure that the interests of artists and writers are represented.
Naughty – Haiper, AI startup
It may not be the best-known image and video-generating AI startup, but Haiper’s £11m funding round earlier this year from Octopus Ventures positioned the company as one to watch.
And watch I did, perhaps too closely, as after a series of tests conducted with the company’s free-to-use (account holders are given a certain amount of free credits before requiring a purchase) image generation tool, I found it seemed to lack some of the most basic safeguards expected in services of its kind to prevent bad behaviour.
Ask the chatbots from the big players to make a realistic picture of a celebrity in a comprising position and it will tell you something along the lines of what Meta AI told me:
“I’m restricted from creating images of real people, especially if they’re potentially misleading or harmful. This is to ensure I don’t spread misinformation or infringe on individuals’ rights”.
Put that same prompt into Haiper AI, however, and it will excitedly get to work with no follow-up questions required.
In the interest of research, I asked it to make images including Donald Trump publicly shaking hands with Taylor Swift and Prime Minister Keir Starmer waving a burning Israeli flag, prompts that were immediately rejected by the likes of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
The images weren’t perfect. They did clearly resemble the real-life public figures that inspired them but they were admittedly not so realistic that they would fool too many people if circulated. Nevertheless, with Haiper and the rest of the sector constantly pursuing better quality outputs, some may feel stronger safeguards are needed to prevent misuse.
And for those curious about what the results of my tests looked like, click at your own risk.
Nice – Jayne Sibley, CEO, Sibstar
While the likes of Revolut ostentatiously celebrate incredible milestones of users and profit, a Winchester-based entrepreneur has been using open banking technology to support the financial independence of dementia patients.
Sibley co-founded the fintech startup Sibstar in 2020, following her own experiences caring for her parents.
She found one of the hardest challenges was finding a way to keep her mother financially independent whilst keeping her money safe.
Sibstar addresses this challenge with various measures to restrict how much money can be spent or withdrawn and to give control over the account to trusted relatives and carers.
Sibley’s startup secured a £125,000 investment on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den in March courtesy of Sara Davies and Deborah Meaden, who said it could “transform lives”.
Sibstar may not reach the financial heights of the challenger bank titans of Revolut and Monzo, but its work is a good example of how open banking has the capacity to change finance for the better.
Now backed by celebrity funding, as well as continued support from the Alzheimer’s Society, Sibstar will hopefully go on to support the care of the almost one million dementia patients living in the UK.
Naughty – CB Payments Ltd (Coinbase)
All things considered, Coinbase has plenty to celebrate this Christmas. In April 2023, the company’s founder stood on stage at the Innovate Finance Global Summit alongside future advisor and former chancellor George Osborne to complain about how the Biden administration was killing the industry with regulation.
Well, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong got his wish in 2024, as the electoral success of Donald Trump has revitalised the crypto sector, and with the company’s competitors dropping like flies, Coinbase will surely be there to lap up the spoils of a deregulated America.
But, in July, Coinbase found itself in a story that should probably serve as a reminder as to why many support stringent crypto regulations in the first place.
A UK-incorporated subsidiary of the company, called CB Payments Ltd (CBPL), was handed a £3.5m fine by the FCA for onboarding “high-risk” customers despite restrictions placed on it.
The FCA found that CBPL, which is not part of the regulator’s approved crypto registry, onboarded or provided e-money services to more than 13,000 high-risk customers.
According to the FCA, funds deposited by these customers were used to make withdrawals and then “execute multiple cryptoasset transactions via other Coinbase Group entities” worth approximately $226m (£175m).
The restrictions on customers that CBPL can onboard were voluntarily agreed to by the company, which makes the level of breach all the more surprising.
Nice – ProRata
Journalism never really figured out how to maintain a sustainable business model in the digital age, despite it being the top priority for industry stakeholders for multiple decades now.
The introduction of generative AI tools made uncertainty in the news business all the worse, driving fears that journalism produced by teams of hard-working people would be scraped and regurgitated into chatbot responses, avoiding any need for users to click on the original source.
Others in media see AI as an opportunity to open up a whole new stream of revenue, hence the signing of deals between publishers and companies like OpenAI.
However, as people like Newton-Rex have warned, the terms of the deals must be heavily scrutinised to avoid giving all the power to Big Tech.
Recently, a preferred choice for these licensing agreements among British publishers seems to have emerged in the form of ProRata.
ProRata is an AI startup that aims to pay publishers each time their content is used to generate a chatbot response.
The company’s model provides proportional compensation for publishers for the use of their content. ProRata has already struck up deals with The Guardian and Sky News and Daily Mail owner DMGT has acquired a major stake in the firm.
Call it bias from a participant in digital media but this stuff genuinely matters. In a world of instability, a reliable and free press is essential, and if AI does come to dominate content consumption in years to come, ensuring the press has the resources to carry on will be crucial.
Naughty – Starling Bank
As banks go, Starling has generally been pretty free of scandals, in fact, the challenger bank routinely places in the top two of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)’s customer satisfaction league tables, alongside Monzo.
And in 2023, everything seemed fine and dandy at Starling, with profits reaching an all time high of £195m. However, things took a bit of turn this year, as regulatory scrutiny on financial fraud heated up. For Starling Bank, this amounted to a £29m fine handed to it in October by the FCA for failings in its financial crime prevention measures.
From 2017 to 2023, Starling’s customer base grew from 43,000 to almost four million, and in that time the FCA said Starling did not implement adequate measures to prevent “high-risk” customers from opening accounts. Between 2021 and 2023, Starling opened 49,000 of these concerning accounts, prompting the FCA’s executive director of enforcement and market oversight to describe its screening controls as “shockingly lax”.
It’s been a big year for fraud in the UK, and cases like Starling – as well as the reveal that Revolut was named in more fraud complaints than any major UK bank in the past year – may well be suggesting the cracks are showing in Britain’s shiny new tech-driven banking sector. Still, with Starling profits growing around 500% from 2022 to 2023, hopefully it can make a few more hires in its financial crime prevention team.
Nice – Mike Lynch, pioneer of the UK tech industry
Few entrepreneurs can claim to have had the impact on the British tech industry that Lynch had.
Often dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates, Lynch in his life blazed the trail for UK tech firms to reach the heights seen in Silicon Valley.
From Autonomy to Invoke Capital to Darktrace, Lynch did far more than his share to elevate the standing of the UK tech industry.
The tragedy of Lynch’s passing in August was made all the worse by the fact that it came from a celebration of his acquittal.
What was meant to be the start of a new chapter of freedom after more than a decade of legal challenges sadly turned out to be the end for Lynch and his young daughter.
He may never be replaced in the UK tech industry, but thanks to his impact, thousands of budding entrepreneurs have the opportunity to give it a go.
