This week’s Guest Judge (and numbers nerd) Wasim Mushtaq former Transformation Lead, Financial Markets at Standard Chartered Bank, provided full transparency of his bespoke scoring system he applied – find out how our participants fared while they spoke about Amazon, Swift, Stripe, The White Stripes, Monzo, Musk, Karaoke, Iran, Russia, Zopa and lots more between the A-Z of Banking and Fintech news of the week.

Links to stuff we spoke about:-

• Why did Stripe attempt to raise on a down round and will they ever IPO?
• Amazon & Stripe double down on payments partnership – perhaps Amazon should just buy them?
• Maybe Stripe should sign The White Stripes as brand ambassadors if they get inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame this year?
• And maybe Musk should just add Stripe to enable payments on Twitter instead of building his own team
• Chris does actually come up with some pretty good raps – take a look at his Fintech Karaoke Challenge here
• And if you missed the reference to Tom and Anne’s alleged spat over chicken dinner then catch up here
• But all seems to be going well at Monzo these days with their attention grabbing news
•  They aren’t the only ones though – remember ZOPA?
• Perhaps Iran should start rolling out Gold dispensing ATMS like India? Especially after this news 
• Will the Iran / Russia collaboration impact SWIFT?
• It’s interesting that they are also talking about a gold backed crypto
• Yes, it really did happen – the Mastercard NFT product lead did resign by minting his resignation letter as an NFT
• The UK economy is in a bad way – is anyone surprised?
• Despite this, the Chancellor still wants to turn the UK into the world’s next silicon valley?
• So why then have they pulled Tech Nation’s funding?
• At least there is a ray of hope from Revolut for a change
• Chatty checkouts anyone? They are actually really positively perceived and are helping the elderly combat loneliness – don’t knock them!
• Crypto hacking seems to be a lucrative business for some 
• We didn’t know Chris was previously involved with IOTA at the very beginning – we learn something new every day
• But this is NOT the way to make money from crypto (is there actually a way????)
• Do we need a DODO and a Mammoth brought back from extinction or is it a Colossal mistake (see what we did there?)
• Surely Meta IS making a colossal mistake with their Metaverse strategy?
• The other guy is intrigued by Lifetise though – check them out and let us know what you think?

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