Money2020’s Exciting Payments Race to Amsterdam With Max Fosh of Team Mobile

Max Fosh is a 24-year old social media entertainer and tech enthusiast. He’s en route with Team Mobile, sponsored by Temenos, in a ‘payments race’ round the world to reach Amsterdam by June 3rd. Current location: Seattle. 

What is your background briefly?

I am a social media entertainer with more than 60k YouTube subscribers and almost 16k followers on Instagram – I make videos mostly aimed at a target audience of students and young professionals.

I launched the StreetSmart YouTube channel a few years ago – where I try to combine light-hearted, comic man-on-the-street clips with sound bits of advice where I can. When done well, social media has the power to connect young people and get them to help each other out and learn more about life’s challenges. That’s what I hope my channel achieves.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

I hope so! I’m up for an adventure and have always been keen to meet new people from all over the world. To complete – or even get going – on a challenge like this, you have to be able to speak to anyone… and try not to get scared (we’ll see how I do on that front!).

My social media experience so far, with plenty of impromptu interviews out and about, has hopefully given me good preparation. I love tech so I like the challenge of the payments race… though I’m not a mathematician or a banker, so I fingers crossed I won’t have any money crises. It’s just me and John the cameraman against the payments world at the moment… wish me luck!

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

I’m currently participating in around the world ‘payments race’ to this year’s Money2020 conference in Amsterdam (June 3rd-5th). There are teams competing against each other to reach Amsterdam using different payment forms… I’m in Team Mobile, using only mobile payments to travel and pay for everything, including hotel stays, clothes, tickets and food.

I’m very interested in tech generally and am seeing how it’s changing the way we spend our money every day, especially among the younger generations. By doing the race, I’m hoping to show how you can survive solely using your mobile phone to get things done – cash, even card, is dying out in many circles.

More and more people are banking and making payments digitally nowadays. Even the banks themselves are having to transform their old legacy systems to accommodate the new way people are paying for stuff.

I’m also keen to explore differences between local economies and local fintech ecosystems on my trip, learning more about how payments are evolving. Is the US as good for mobile payments as London? Belfast was pretty easy – but how about later on in Asia? We’ll find out.

How is the payments race going and what have you learned?

London to Belfast was pretty smooth… but when I then went on to Dublin, it was a nightmare planning ahead for Seattle. The hotel I’d initially hoped to book out there would only take card payments… and not via a mobile app.

When I got on the plane too, you could only pay for films by providing card details – so sat there watching a black screen. I’m still a big believer that the mobile phone will actually eventually dominate the way we pay… but there’s still clearly some infrastructure issues to solve! Companies and modes of transport must accommodate more for mobile payments.

How can people find out more about you & your work

You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, where I will be keeping you updated on my trip. I’m in Seattle now but will be using my mobile to get to my next location later tonight or tomorrow… I still need to sort out exactly where the next stop is!

You can read an article about Money2020 here.

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