“Europe’s startup ecosystem can get caught up in the game of pitting one city or one country against another. But it’s a vain and rather useless endeavour. Many European tech companies wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t tapped resources from different countries and cities.”

Nicolas Colin, Co-Founder and Director, The Family.

Good morning!

It’s been a tough week for some, despite expectations of an easy pre-Christmas life. Of particular note was that the whereabouts of £50bn worth of banknotes had become unknown, and police are now asking anyone who comes across them to kindly return them to their owner, the Bank of England. Yes, you heard that correctly: the Bank of England has indeed lost track of its banknotes. Whether or not that is an easy feat to accomplish, we’ll let you judge, but that part about the police we made up. With cash being in most cases the cheapest form of payment for merchants to accept, and being a very powerful budgeting tool, especially for poorer people, it is easy to see that cash still is not dead. Even the European Central Bank recognizes cash as a robust store of value. Let’s all now lie back for a few moments and think about what people used to do in a cash-only world.

In the news last week:

Voice technology is here. We knew it already to some extent, but it is actually far more advanced than many of us realize. It is convenient, otherwise why would so many people use Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Assistant? These virtual ladies (their names are a big give-away) form one side of the technology, human-machine interaction, or HMI. The other side of the technology is natural language processing (NLP) coupled with the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) combo.

The issue with voice technology is there is a point where its convenience starts to be detrimental to our privacy. That’s a thin line that many companies are dancing on, and some are crossing. With something as unique as our voice, it is very sensitive personal information we are dealing with, which in some countries is extremely well protected. It is nonetheless a growing market.

Sensitive information is taken more seriously by some organisations than others, which typically places great value on confidentiality and information security. One example is the German Army, which dares not use WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram, instead is looking at open-source solutions like Matrix. However, this is the tip of the iceberg, as we can see that the business-to-business market has more than 150 players.

There are many opportunities that voice technology can offer, and though we remain skeptical if it will ever replace humans, it will certainly at a minimum be used to augment the customer sales experience. Hopefully the days of semi-automated call centres and machine commands that are unable to recognize different accents are gone!

• What makes a European start-up British instead of French or Spanish?
• Company politics are nasty, but Google’s look particularly bad.

Find out more about what we do, and read our previous newsletters and insights.

FinTech

• The bank of the future will be customer-centric, allegedly.
• Ever wondered what Mastercard is up to in the FinTech space?
• ...and how about Visa?
• Revolut expands beyond mobile-only.
• Meet Varo Bank.
• Teen-focused banking app gets celebrity support.

Technology

• Millenials discover the joys of a phone call.
• Human judgment will still be required with AI.
• NASA sets precedence on space mining.
• European Investment Bank invests in space.
• Self-driving truck startup TuSimple raises $350mn.

FAMGA and more

• A 50-year-old scientific riddle solved by AI thanks to Alphabet’s DeepMind.
• Twitter’s Audio Spaces has a few cool features.
• Facebook cryptocurrency project changes its clothes.
• Ankorstore proves the point that the world of tomorrow does not belong to Amazon.
• Apple’s best apps of 2020.

Mergers, acquisitions

• Facebook likely paid $1bn for user-knowledge company Kustomer.
• SoftBank pays $690mn for stake in customer-services firm Sinch.

• 5 myths about fundraising.
• Accel leads £14mn funding round for Primer.
• Why can Europe not come up with alternatives to VC funding?
• Founders and investors can now meet on Floww and use objective criteria.
• Spain’s Jeff sees entrepreneurship differently.
• Monzo secures £60mn funding.
• ReceiptHero obtains $2mn seed funding.