Geoff Whitehouse

Content @clear_bank. Open banking fan, payment 🤓 SW16 via B14.

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

Monetization ruined X.

[Johann @LookAtMyMeat1]

He was earning $16,000 a month posting nothing but engagement bait and people wonder why this site went to shit

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

'almost' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

An estimated $60 billion was spent on remittance fees in 2025.

This could be almost zero with stablecoins.

[dan barker @danbarker]

I've been on the peripheries of a few campaigns like this. Usually it works roughly like the following:

1. The government puts pressure on firms to try and achieve something - eg, trying to get the industry to push UK investments more, or to encourage people to put more in UK investmentw.
2. The firms don't want to do that, or they're already doing what they can, but want to retain good links with the government, so they come up with the idea of a joint marketing campaign to promote UK investment.
3. Most of the firms realise it will achieve very little, but will keep the govt on-side. 20 firms each agree to put up £800k for an initial year, with the possibility of continuing for another 2 years. A small cost individually for big financial firms.
4. There's then a process to appoint media and creative agencies to come up with a concept, and get paid a few hundred thousand pounds.
5. There is collective realisation there is nowhere to actually point people who see the ads: they can't go to an individual website to open an investment account, as there are 20 firms involved. And if they send them to a central place, there is little they can put there, other than info on how investing works.
6. They also have the problem of getting 20 firms to agree the creative approach.
7. So then it all ends up a bit 'lowest common denominator' - they come up with a bland cartoon mascot, and infantilise the audience as there's always worry that people won't 'get it', and the only reference points for campaigns like this are other bland mascots.
8. There's then a big launch, with the headline number of 'up to'£50m to get press coverage, though usually that assumes it will run for several years and none of the firms will back out.
9. The campaign launch, and criticism of the launch, generally gets more coverage than the campaign itself. The £50m sounds good to the press, as it is big enough to sound impactful, but sounds wasteful to others.
10. At the end they're not sure how to measure its effect, so all of the firms involved are asked to supply numbers on how well the campaign has affected them - they all scrap around to find the most positive numbers they can, as they don't want to look bad, and then centrally they add that to a 'brand recall' campaign which asks if people have heard of 'Savvy Squirrel', and if they've thought about investing more in the last 6 months. Ie: nothing which really indicates that the campaign has helped people to invest more, bit things that will sound broadly positive.
11. Everyone in the industry pretends it's gone well, as they want to appear successful to each other, snd want to keep the govt on-side. The media agencies pretend it's gone well, as if it continues they get paid for another year. But nobody's fully sure if it made a positive difference, or no difference, or if - counterintuitively- it was worse than doing nothing, as it took up time and money that could have been used more wisely.

And then it continues till it fizzles out, or the next government is in place.

Not saying it is the case here, but having seen a few of these I have suspicions!

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

We're all Derek.

[Jon @giftedrascal]

We were once forced into this escape room shite for 'team building' we had a BDM called Derek.

Derek was 64 years old. He sat on the floor in the middle of the room with his arms folded and said "I'm not fucking doing this! You can get fucked"

I miss Derek.

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

@AlexH_Johnson Needed a rebrand, but...to....this?!

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

Strictly speaking his customers would have made this return, as it was their money.

[Jason Shuman @JasonrShuman]

So you’re telling me SBF did Anthropic, Cursor, Solana and Robinhood?

His NAV would’ve been about $52-86B today

9.8-16.2X TVPI

🤯

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

Typical expand too quickly, manage a business on spreadsheets scenario. FM has been poor for years...and of course they're shutting the original site.

[City A.M. @CityAM]

The sourdough giant is closing 16 UK restaurants, including its original Brixton site 🍕

With 225 jobs at risk, parent company Fulham Shore is restructuring to combat rising industry pressures and stiff competition from Rudy’s and Pizza Pilgrims.

Is the affordable sourdough craze officially over? 📉

#FrancoManca #UKBusiness #Pizza #Hospitality

[Josh Billinson @jbillinson]

Oh you get your news from the mainstream media? I get mine from a a16z funded livestream of an Australian guy scrolling Twitter to read OSINT accounts aggregating the New York Times

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

Louder for those at the back.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Pretty confident no one in tech knows what a Bloomberg terminally actually is or does

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

@HarryHorsfall_ Do you know how little space there is in the tunnels? It's cramped af hence the need to shut entire lines to service signals.

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

Nah. You've messed up too many times now for multiple seasons.

[Wolves @Wolves]

A message to supporters from Nathan Shi.

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

Remember when fintech marketing was good?

This screams AI generated idea. Tries to be clever, fails.

[Haz @HarryHorsfall_]

wow @wise

next time you wanna do an ad, ping me. this is awful 😢

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

I can answer this - of course they're not vetting candidates and I don't think they care, either.

[Cllr Donna Harris @LibDemDonna]

I’ve written to @ZackPolanski and @GreenPartyScott demanding answers. Allegations of antisemitism and support for a proscribed terrorist organisation are extremely serious and cannot be ignored.

[Out of Context Human Race @NoContextHumans]

I’ve never seen anything more accurate

[Geoff Whitehouse @ByGeoffW]

Nope.

[Semafor @semafor]

The 2026 @FIFAWorldCup Final will feature a "halftime show" for the first time in history, FIFA President Gianni Infantino tells @maxwelltani, revealing it will be "curated by Chris Martin and Coldplay."

"I cannot yet tell you which artists will be performing, but it's not one, it's more than one. And it will be the biggest in the world. It will be fantastic."

[Paul Moore - Security Consultant  @Paul_Reviews]

.@vonderleyen "The European #AgeVerification app is technically ready. It respects the highest privacy standards in the world. It's open-source, so anyone can check the code..."

I did. It didn't take long to find what looks like a serious #privacy issue.

The app goes to great lengths to protect the AV data AFTER collection (is_over_18: true is AES-GCM'd); it does so pretty well.

But, the source image used to collect that data is written to disk without encryption and not deleted correctly.

For NFC biometric data:
It pulls DG2 and writes a lossless PNG to the filesystem. It's only deleted on success. If it fails for any reason (user clicks back, scan fails & retries, app crashes etc), the full biometric image remains on the device in cache. This is protected with CE keys at the Android level, but the app makes no attempt to encrypt/protect them.

For selfie pictures:
Different scenario. These images are written to external storage in lossless PNG format, but they're never deleted. Not a cache... long-term storage. These are protected with DE keys at the Android level, but again, the app makes no attempt to encrypt/protect them.

This is akin to taking a picture of your passport/government ID using the camera app and keeping it just in case. You can encrypt data taken from it until you're blue in the face... leaving the original image on disk is crazy & unnecessary.

From a #GDPR standpoint:
Biometric data collected is special category data. If there's no lawful basis to retain it after processing, that's potentially a material breach.
https://t.co/PKQ0DWSYzL

[Pee De @SpeedyCalls]

X just announced is launching a new “Cashtags feature.”

$TSLA. $BTC. $ETH. The $ convention that the entire financial internet runs on wasn’t built by X. It was built by @Stocktwits in 2008/2009. Howard Lindzon, Soren Mcbeth, Phil Pearlman and a small team.

Twitter copied it in 2012 and had the nerve to be the ones to name it “cashtag.”

Lindzon’s response at the time:
“you can hijack a plane but it does not mean you know how to fly it.”

Now in 2026, X is “launching cashtags”, a 17-year-old idea.

@howardlindzon & the @Stocktwits crew built it before anyone cared.

give credit where it’s due. 🫡

[Seth Frantzman @sfrantzman]

It fascinates me that anyone could look at this conflict and not admire Ukraine. They look at these two leaders, one who is innovating and fighting for his people...and one who is sitting in the Kremlin...and think "oh yes I admire the guy in the Kremlin relying on mercenaries hired from abroad....not the guy who innovates and resisted invasion."

But then again...it's the same types apparently who looked at young and strong and inspiring Peter Magyar and thought "oh, yes superannuated Orban is better"....so it must just be a glitch....because no reasonable person would ever draw those conclusions.