The Future of Fintech Is Small: Notes for the Digital DNA Panel

On Stage 1 at Digital DNA 2022 for “The Future of Fintech: The next big thing?” The case for small change, and why the hard part of fintech is design.

Published on June 16, 2022

“The Future of Fintech: The next big thing?” That was the question on Stage 1 at Digital DNA yesterday morning, and I was one of four people asked to answer it, alongside Simon Whittaker, Chris Gregg and Daniel Broby. Forty minutes, St George’s Market, ten o’clock on the second day of a conference that brought more than 2,500 people through the doors.

David Shawe in the Sugar t-shirt on the Digital DNA Belfast Hub Crawl, with the Hub Crawl title and partner logos — On the Digital DNA Belfast Hub Crawl in the Sugar t-shirt. We only ordered one, and it arrived just in time.

I was there as the founder of Sugar as much as the owner of Invisible Building, so here is the case I went to make.

The next big thing is small

Fintech panels tend to look up: open banking, embedded finance, central bank digital currencies, whatever the acronym is this year. I’d look down. At the counter of a coffee shop, where the tip jar is empty because nobody carries coins. At the person behind that counter, working hard for low wages in a cost-of-living crisis. The future of finance that matters to most people is about very small amounts of money moving between ordinary people, cheaply and directly.

That is Sugar’s whole thesis: the future of finance, starting with small change. It is why our first product is a tip jar.

The hard part isn’t the technology

I’ve spent this year inside the Bitcoin Design Community, and built my first Lightning payments project at a hackathon in March. The thing that experience teaches quickly is that the engineering mostly works. A Lightning payment settles in a second or two for a fraction of a penny. What doesn’t work yet is everything around it: the onboarding, the jargon, the fear of getting it wrong with real money.

That is a design problem, and design is underfunded in fintech for the same reason it is underfunded everywhere: it doesn’t look like progress on a roadmap. The products that win the next decade will be the ones a person can use correctly the first time without reading anything.

Northern Ireland is a good place to try

We have a serious fintech sector and a small, well-connected market. Between Catalyst, Raise Ventures and events like this one, there is more support for someone starting out than in most places ten times the size. It is a good place to test something small on real people before taking it anywhere else.

A word for the sceptics

I come at this as a designer, and I’m not here to tell anyone what to invest in. The part of bitcoin I find most worth a designer’s time is narrow: open, permissionless payments that work for small amounts. If that turns out to be the next big thing, it will be because somebody made it boring enough to put on a café counter.

Thanks to Digital DNA for the invitation.

From the archive: written up in 2026 from our notes and records of the time, and dated to when it happened.