Marcus runs a logistics company in the Midlands — forty-three employees, contracts with three of the country’s largest retailers. He was turned down twice for a £200,000 growth facility. Not because the business was weak. Because its numbers couldn’t speak for it.
is the case that Marcus isn't an exception.
He's the norm
The businesses waiting on a government timetable to fix it are waiting on the wrong clock.
Financial technology solved distribution years ago. Payments, lending, forecasting — all faster and more embedded than they were a decade back. What it hasn’t solved is understanding. That’s the actual gap: not a technology problem, but a comprehension crisis, and until recently an uncosted one.
Nobody’s hiding this from small business owners. Nobody needs to. The tools arrived quietly, release note by release note, until they were load-bearing.
FutureDotNow’s £23 billion figure is a careful, well-sourced estimate of the workforce digital skills gap — worth taking seriously on its own terms. Financial comprehension sits next to it. Bigger, probably. Nobody has costed it yet, which tells you something about which problem gets the attention.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology puts deliberate AI adoption among UK SMBs at around sixteen per cent. Ask instead how many are running AI at all — folded into the accounting platform, the payments dashboard, a CRM’s new scoring feature — and the number is closer to seventy. Most of those owners couldn’t tell you which decisions the software is making on their behalf, or why.
Parliament passed a Financial Inclusion Strategy in November 2025 and pencilled in primary-school financial literacy from 2028. Worthwhile goals. Wrong clock. The business making decisions this quarter can’t wait for a curriculum aimed at today’s six-year-olds.
Financially Wired argues the private sector doesn’t need to wait for that curriculum, and mostly shouldn’t want to. Ten chapters, one cumulative case: financial fluency is this decade’s competitive edge, built once and compounding, and the businesses that get there first won’t just survive the FinTech era. They’ll set its terms.
Each chapter makes one move in a single cumulative case. Open any of them below for a line on what it argues.
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One recent column opens with John, a boat engineer, three weeks after a conversation about his business finances.
He’d just realised that a professional life spent moving between countries and connectivity zones wasn’t only a source of friction — it was a source of financial options a business fixed to one office doesn’t get. Nobody had hidden this from him. Nobody had framed his finances in terms that connected to his actual life, so he’d managed them the way you manage weather: absorbed, worked around, not thought about more than necessary.
Yanka Golemin
Yanka Golemin builds financial fluency programmes for businesses that have been told, one way or another, that finance is somebody else’s job. She’s the founder and chief executive of Vogue Boost, a UK company working with small and mid-sized organisations on the comprehension gap this book describes.
She came to the subject from inside it, over thirty years. Much of that was financial crime and forensic investigation at institutional scale — work that teaches you, faster than anything else does, how much an organisation can fail to notice about itself. She has also taken technology companies through regulatory scrutiny and founded businesses across fintech, professional services and the public sector. The account of institutional power in this book is written from within one.
She holds advanced education in informatics and strategy, and co-authored a university textbook on knowledge management — a book written for people already inside the subject. This one isn’t. It’s her first for a general readership, and the argument in it has been assembled over years of sitting with business owners while they read their own numbers properly for the first time.
@YankaGolemin
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