Funding Circle CTO on Software Engineers, AI Native Org, £17bn Lending Engine

Do you know what? There's so much happening at the moment.

I spend a reasonable amount of time actually and I've created my own little gems that will literally run on a daily basis with here's the latest news that I get to digest in the morning and I'll spend some time just going through that.

That's mainly focused on AI right now, obviously.

And actually, internally, across Funding Circle, we've got some really good comms channels where everyone is invited to share information about what's happening in fintech, in technology, in AI specifically.

So we've got a good kind of heartbeat of news, updates, and sharing going on, which I think is great because especially now, I think, you know, the more you can absorb yourself in that to understand it, the better.

Having said that, I could easily spend my entire day reading all the things that are going out there, which obviously would never work.

So you do have to find a balance.

But I'm also a big fan of podcasts, you know, train into the office, podcasts, listening to what's going on as well.

So I do spend a fair amount of time because you have to.

And so something that's in the news, and you mentioned cybersecurity earlier, obviously you've got Anthropic and Mythos and the new version, which everyone is a bit scared of, to be honest, and quite rightly so.

Not so much for your funding circle, but just more generally and putting you talking to other CTOs and so on.

What's the general feeling and approach to something like that?

We are keeping a very close eye on, obviously.

I think they're committed to, although they're not allowing access, they're committing to report on findings in about 90 days, I think it is.

And I see it from two perspectives.

Obviously, in the wrong hands, that could, based on the information that's been shared, could be a real threat, right? There's no doubt about that.

But on the other hand, part of me is thinking I'd really like to get my hands on it and use it for our own purposes as well.

So there's definitely two sides to it.

And I think the purpose sounds like a good purpose, but obviously with all these things, there's some potential risk associated with it as well.

So it's a watching brief from our perspective.

We invest a lot in our cyber controls and we are always reviewing and continually assessing our landscape on an ongoing basis.

This obviously even further makes you want to sharpen your pencil on that even further.

But we invest a lot of effort, time and resource in these things already.

Just as a lot of our audience are kind of people at the start of their careers, could you talk to kind of DevOps and SecOps and cybersecurity and how actually that's a really big area to be in.

It's only going to get bigger as we go forward.