Fintech Finance News: The Video-First Fintech News Service Known as FF News

Fintech Finance News, known to its audience as FF News, is a UK fintech news service based in London that publishes daily financial technology news, interviews, video programmes and magazines from ffnews.com. Founded in 2015, it has built its reputation on a distinctive, entertainment-led approach to business journalism, travelling the world to film the people changing financial services and writing that coverage up into an extensive magazine library.

In a sector crowded with text-only trade titles, FF News set out to be watched as much as read. Its shows, podcasts and event coverage treat fintech as a story of personalities as well as products, and its founder remains on camera as one of the service's most recognisable presenters more than a decade after launch.

Overview

FF News aims, in its own terms, to produce the best content in fintech, from show episodes to event coverage, across the full range of topics within the financial services industry. Its site combines a daily news wire, publishing company announcements, funding rounds, product launches and executive moves, with original video series, podcasts and three magazine titles covering fintech, payments and insurance technology.

The audience is the financial services industry itself: bankers, payments executives, insurers, technology vendors, investors and the fintech founders building new services. Content ranges from short news items that keep practitioners current to long-form filmed interviews and magazine features that explore strategy in depth, all presented in a deliberately informal, high-energy style that distinguishes the brand from traditional financial publishing.

History and Founding

Fintech Finance was founded in 2015, during the first wave of London's emergence as a global fintech centre, when challenger banks, payments startups and blockchain companies were multiplying and the industry lacked media that reflected its pace and personality. The business behind it, Advertainment Media, was built by its founder from a bootstrapped startup into a profitable company with turnover in the millions, while retaining full ownership of the equity.

The brand's early identity was shaped around filmed formats. By 2018 its Paytech Show was already several series deep, taking cameras to the chief executives of banking infrastructure and payments companies, and its presenters were travelling extensively to find features the founder describes as ranging from Manchester to Mongolia. A podcast strand, News From The FinTech Front, had reached its 97th episode by 2021, by which time the news site, shows and magazines were operating as a single integrated service.

Ownership and Leadership

FF News is privately held and led by its founder, Ali Paterson, who is the service's founder, chief executive and editor-in-chief. Paterson presents much of its flagship video content himself, interviewing representatives from across the financial services landscape, and he created The Payments Race, one of the brand's best-known entertainment formats. Biographical profiles note that he grew the parent company from a bootstrapped start to profitability while retaining 100 per cent of the equity, an unusual ownership position among trade media businesses.

The team behind him produces shows, podcasts, magazines and event coverage from the United Kingdom for an international schedule of filming. Company profiles list the business in media production, with a headcount in the dozens and a much larger extended network of contributors, guests and production partners assembled around the industry events circuit where much of its content originates.

Services and Distribution

The service distributes content through ffnews.com, video platforms, podcast feeds and its magazine library. All of its video coverage is written up into its magazines, The Fintech Magazine, The Paytech Magazine and The Insurtech Magazine, so a filmed interview at a conference becomes a print-style feature as well as a programme, multiplying the reach of each piece of reporting.

For the industry, FF News offers a route to visibility built around that content engine. Companies appear through news coverage of their announcements, filmed interviews and show appearances, magazine features and event programming, and the site carries extensive company profiles alongside its editorial. Event organisers and sponsors feature prominently in its coverage model: the service films at major financial services conferences, producing episode content from summits and expos that is then distributed to its audience year-round.

Editorial Coverage

Coverage spans the complete range of financial services topics, described by the publisher as running from branches to blockchain. Daily news includes funding rounds, partnerships, product launches, regulatory developments and executive appointments across banking, payments, wealth, insurance and digital assets. Recent news coverage, for example, has reported European fintech funding rounds and platform launches from Paris and London-based companies, illustrating the wire's international daily diet.

The original programming organises that breadth into themed shows. The Fintech Show examines banking and technology strategy, The Paytech Show focuses on payments, and The Insurtech Show covers insurance innovation, with episodes built around conversations with the executives responsible: a Paytech Show edition, for instance, brought together payments firms and a Caribbean bank to discuss real-time payments, while Insurtech Show episodes have paired insurers with fraud and automation specialists. Podcasts, including The FF Salon and News From The FinTech Front, add discussion formats alongside the filmed series.

Clients and Media Partners

The companies appearing across FF News programming constitute its commercial community. Global payments and banking figures have featured from the service's early years: the chief executive of Banking Circle and the chairman of Worldpay were interviewed for a single early Paytech Show episode alongside a senior Square hardware executive. More recent programming has featured executives from Checkout.com, whose chief marketing officer discussed the payments industry's evolution on its podcast, and from banks including ABN AMRO and Sagicor Bank.

Technology and services firms are equally prominent, from core banking and automation providers filmed at industry summits to insurers such as Hastings Direct and data firms such as AutoRek in its insurtech programming. These organisations engage through interviews, show sponsorship, magazine features and event partnerships, gaining exposure to an audience of financial services practitioners that the service has cultivated for over a decade.

Coverage Areas

FF News is explicit that its reporting is international. Its teams travel extensively across borders to find the most interesting and undiscovered features, in its founder's phrase from Manchester to Mongolia, and its guest lists reflect that range: European, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and North American companies appear regularly in its shows and news coverage, alongside the London fintech scene where the service is based.

Event coverage drives much of that geography. The service films at financial services conferences internationally, with episodes recorded at summits covering banking transformation, payments and insurance, and its news wire reports funding and product stories from fintech centres worldwide. The result is a UK-based news service whose editorial map is set by the global industry's calendar rather than by a single home market.

Digital Platforms

Ffnews.com organises the service's output into news, fintech TV episodes, podcasts, videos, company profiles and the magazine archive. The magazine library is substantial: by October 2026 The Fintech Magazine had reached its 39th issue, The Paytech Magazine its 18th and The Insurtech Magazine its 11th, each issue's articles published individually on the site alongside the video coverage from which many of them derive.

Video is distributed through embedded players and the major video platforms, with episodes also syndicated as podcasts through podcast directories, where series such as The FF Salon reach listeners in audio form. That multi-format distribution, in which a single interview can exist as a filmed episode, a podcast, a magazine feature and a news story, is the operational core of the business and the reason its relatively small team sustains such a volume of output.

Notable Work

The Payments Race, created by founder Ali Paterson, is the brand's signature entertainment format, sending participants racing using different payment methods and turning the everyday mechanics of payments into watchable competition. It exemplifies the service's founding idea that financial technology content could be genuinely entertaining without losing its industry substance, and it remains one of the formats with which Paterson is most closely associated.

Other long-running formats include Fintech Fire Round, a light-hearted interview show in which Paterson questioned the co-founder of consultancy 11:FS over spicy food, and the Virtual Arena discussion series, which tackled topics from generative AI in back-office processes to the recycling of expired payment cards with panels of practitioners. News From The FinTech Front passed its 97th episode in 2021, and the podcast operation as a whole has been recognised within the industry as it passed major episode milestones.

Events and Community

Rather than owning a single flagship conference, FF News embeds itself in the industry's events circuit, filming episodes and interviews at summits and exhibitions across financial services. Its 2026 video output includes extensive coverage recorded at the Banking Transformation Summit and other sector gatherings, with executives from core banking, automation and treasury technology companies filmed on site.

This presence makes the service a familiar part of the community it covers. Founders and executives encounter its cameras at the events they already attend, and its presenters are regular speakers and moderators in their own right: Paterson has appeared as a speaker at international fintech gatherings including Fintech Islands. The community relationship is reciprocal, with the industry's events supplying the service's content and the service amplifying those events to its audience.

Recent Developments

The service's recent output shows the model operating at full stretch. The Fintech Magazine's 39th issue, published in October 2026, carried exclusive features on the Wero European payments scheme with payabl., on securing agentic commerce with G+D and Daon, on Raiffeisen Bank International's transformation of Central and Eastern European banking, and on the state of UK fintech fundraising with HSBC Innovation Banking, a snapshot of the themes, AI agents, instant payments and funding conditions, dominating the industry's agenda.

Daily news and event filming have continued in parallel, with 2026 episodes of The Paytech Show reaching their high eighties and summit coverage published through the year. More than a decade after its 2015 founding, Fintech Finance News remains an independent, founder-led service whose combination of a daily wire, filmed shows, podcasts and magazines gives it a distinctive place in the UK's fintech media landscape.