Nick Perrett is the co-founder and CEO of Prosper, a wealth management platform built for the generation that grew up digitally native and won't accept legacy fees or legacy software. He describes himself as an accidental entrepreneur, bribed into consulting at 18, then pulled through VC, early computer vision AI, and a decade building video games before co-founding Prosper with his university friend Ricky.
In this episode, Nick traces that unlikely path and explains why almost all of it turned out to be relevant. He gets into the early AI work he was doing in 2003, face recognition, cancer detection, photoreal animation and why the stories being told about AI today are essentially identical to the ones he was pitching to the CIA's VC fund twenty years ago.
He talks about the Tandem Bank alumni network, how fintech talent ecosystems compound over time, and why the UK startup scene is roughly two or three VC cycles behind the US and what that actually means for founders building here now. There's also an honest conversation about the FCA, why regulation is genuinely good for consumers, how to embed compliance into a product sprint without it killing momentum, and why first-time founders keep making the same mistake of waiting for direct authorisation before they have a single customer.
And he closes with something that doesn't get said enough: technical founders need a commercial co-founder early, because traction is a sales and marketing problem, not an engineering one. If you're building in fintech, or thinking about it this one covers the decisions that actually matter at the start.
Once you're booked in, we'll send you a free playbook on Financial promotions compliance for FinTechs.
