15 lessons
Where Your Deposit Actually Goes
There is no vault with your name on it. Your £1,000 became someone's mortgage within hours, here's the flow.
Inside Your Credit Score
Five inputs, one number, and the most consequential algorithm in your financial life.
BNPL Under the Hood
Klarna pays the shop today, you pay Klarna over six weeks, nobody charges you interest. So where's the money coming from?
Bank Runs at Internet Speed
SVB lost $42 billion of deposits in one day, no queues, just group chats and a banking app.
How Banks Create Money When They Lend
Your bank didn't lend you someone else's savings. It typed a number into your account and conjured the money into existence, then deleted it again as you repaid. Here's the keystroke that makes most of the money in the economy.
A Mortgage Application, From Inside
You sign one form and wait three weeks. Behind the scenes, a credit score, a debt ratio and an appraiser decide your fate — and within months your loan is sold to strangers who never met you.
Loan Syndication: How 20 Banks Share One $5B Loan
No single bank wants $5 billion of exposure to one borrower. So one bank wins the mandate, underwrites the whole thing, then quietly sells most of it to nineteen others — and keeps the trophy.
Borrow Short, Lend Long: ALM and the SVB Failure Mode
A bank takes deposits you can pull tomorrow and lends them out for 30 years. That gap is the whole business model — and the thing that killed Silicon Valley Bank in 48 hours.
Resolution Weekend: What the FDIC and FSCS Actually Do
Your bank fails on a Friday. By Monday morning the doors reopen, your card still works, and your insured cash is untouched. Here is the choreography that pulls that off in 48 hours.
Covenants and Loan Workouts: What Happens When a Borrower Trips
A company can be perfectly current on every interest payment and still be in default — because one ratio drifted 0.1x the wrong way. That trip wire is a covenant, and pulling it starts a negotiation worth millions.
Trade Finance: The 400-Year-Old Machinery Behind Every Shipping Container
A factory in Vietnam ships £400,000 of goods to a buyer it has never met, in a country whose courts it cannot afford to fight in. It gets paid anyway. The trick is a letter that turns a stranger’s promise into a bank’s.
Factoring & Invoice Finance: Selling Your Receivables
You raised a £100,000 invoice on 60-day terms — but payroll is due Friday. Invoice finance hands you ~£85,000 of it today, against money you've already earned but can't yet touch.
Credit Cards From the Issuer Side: Revolvers vs Transactors
If you pay your card in full every month, you are not the customer. You are the bait. The product is built for the person who carries a balance, and the maths is brutal about it.
Debt Collection & Charge-Offs: The Afterlife of an Unpaid Loan
Stop paying your card and after six months the bank declares the debt a loss, then sells it for four cents on the dollar. The debt does not die. It just changes owners, and the people chasing it paid almost nothing for the right to chase you.
Basel Capital Rules: Why Banks Can't Lend Infinitely
A bank takes your £1,000 deposit and lends out £900 of it, then the borrower deposits it, and the bank lends again. So what stops the music? Not the deposits, the bank's own capital, and a rulebook that prices every loan by how risky it is.