Financially Wired
eBook & Audio Book
The Book
"I didn’t know this was available to me."
John, a boat engineer, in the conversation Chapter Nine is built around.
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Financially Wired:
The SMB Owner’s Guide to the FinTech Era
The audiobook, written by Yanka Golemin
Plenty of British small businesses are running AI they never chose. It arrived inside their accounting software in an update nobody read, and began deciding which invoices to chase first. Financially Wired is about what that gap in understanding costs, and why the owners paying for it shouldn’t wait for government to close it.
How it opens
The letter ran to four sentences.
It thanked Marcus for his application. It confirmed that the facility had not been approved. It referred, without elaborating, to current lending criteria. And it suggested he might wish to apply again at a later date.
Nothing in it was rude, and nothing in it was informative. Marcus read it twice, put it in the drawer where he kept things he didn’t want on his desk, and did not apply again — not to them, and not to anyone else for six months. He was fifty-two, eleven years into running a logistics business with forty-three employees and contracts with retailers whose names anyone in the Midlands would recognise, and he had just been told, in the politest available language, that he wasn’t good enough for £200,000.
From the Introduction, “The gap nobody has costed”.
Why listen to this one
Owners and finance leads don’t often get a clear evening with a business book. They get the drive in, or a morning on hold to the bank, which is more or less what this recording is for.
It suits being heard because the argument travels with people. Anna turns her coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer before she chooses her words. Priya reads a client’s email twice, then forwards it to her office manager, because she has no idea what an AP automation platform is. By the time the book reaches algorithmic accountability, you’ve already met the lawyer who has to explain it to partners who practised law before the internet was commercially significant.
(A practical note, with John in mind: download it before you go anywhere the signal drops. His satellite connection was always on maritime mode. He mentioned it in passing, and Chapter Nine ends up turning on it.)
Who’s in it
The argument is carried by a handful of people. All of them except John are composites, assembled from people Yanka Golemin has worked with.
Marcus
Founder
His logistics business was creditworthy and illegible at the same time. The lender’s model read eighteen months of his open banking data, found a gap between the revenue his accounting software reported and the money reaching his bank, and passed a cautionary score to the relationship manager before she’d asked her first question. The gap had an ordinary explanation: sixty-day payment terms with his largest client. Nobody had told Marcus an explanation might be needed, and the model had no way to hear one. He runs through most of the book.
Priya
Founder
Built a twelve-person HR consultancy around people she trusts; eight of them have been with her more than three years. For a long time she read a skills problem as a process problem.
Daniel
Founder
Thirty-one people work in his food business. He knows more about financial technology than almost anyone in his sector, and for years none of it turned into a decision. (There is a notes app. It kept growing.)
Anna and Arthur
Legal
Anna is thirty-one, the youngest partner in her firm’s history, advising FinTech founders and AI developers on rules that haven’t been written yet. Arthur Pemberton, her senior colleague, started as a trainee the year the Companies Act 1985 came into force. Every individual thing he says is correct, and that is Anna’s problem.
John
Founder
Designs the structures that keep boats seaworthy, and for years treated his finances the way most capable people treat weather, as something to absorb and work around. Several weeks into talking about his business, he asked two precise questions and then said the eight words at the top of this page.
Running order
An introduction and ten chapters, each followed by its two case studies
The gap nobody has costed
The introduction. A four-sentence letter from a lender, and everything it left out.
01
The great financial illiteracy
Opens on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971, with a cartoon coin called Dickie Decimal that nobody under sixty remembers.
02
The invisible revolution
Ten past seven, and Marcus is checking a dashboard he has trusted for eleven years.
03
The capital access myth
Four months of Marcus working out what his own data says about him, then an approval in ten days.
04
The expertise delusion
Three weeks after the facility comes through, a fee on Marcus’s payment statement creeps up, and this time he notices.
05
The workforce crisis hiding inside your payroll
An invoice paid eleven days late, which Priya puts down to the client.
06
AI is already in the room
Daniel and Anna, both kept waiting at a restaurant bar in Hackney.
07
Compliance is culture
Anna tries to make her case to Arthur, once, in a corridor in November.
08
The Internal University
Marcus, Priya, Daniel and Anna, each working out how to hand what they’ve learned to the people around them.
09
The aspiration gap
John.
10
The wired economy
Anna takes her proposal to the full partnership on a Thursday. Arthur asks four questions.
John messaged three weeks after that conversation. He’d spoken to a tax adviser who specialises in maritime professionals, and found two AI tools that ran reliably on maritime satellite. He said he’d started looking at his finances the way he looks at a boat:
a structure with specific loads, which can be understood, and therefore steered.
Where to listen:
Prefer to read it? The Kindle edition is on Amazon.
2,000 readers & listeners
written in London
