In this edition of YAP On The Record, we sat down with Hamish Monk, Senior Reporter at Finextra. We spoke about the wonderfully winding road that led him from English lit graduate to media buyer to PR professional to, via a brief but apparently very fulfilling detour into professional gardening, one of fintech’s most compelling journalists. We covered prediction markets, geopolitical rabbit holes, the art of a good pitch, and why he’s not making any predictions about AI in the newsroom.
How did you end up at Finextra, and what drew you to covering financial services and fintech specifically?
Serendipitously, honestly. I left university with an English literature degree and, like most people, was completely unable to apply what I’d learned. So I became a media buyer, bidding for ad spots on Sky and Channel 4 for clients like Heineken. From there, I drifted into PR at a financial services agency, which I hadn’t aimed for at all. But the role involved writing, ghostwriting op-eds for clients, and that kept me engaged. I stayed for about five years, and by the end of it, I thought: I’d quite like to be on the other side of this fence. We’d worked a lot with Finextra, so I knew the outlet well. A job opened up, I went for it, and got it. The rest is history, with a couple of interruptions. I left for a year or two at one point to be a gardener, which was genuinely wonderful. Doesn’t pay the bills, unfortunately, but I loved it.
You cover a pretty wide beat, AI in banking, regulatory policy, and sovereign tech infrastructure. How do you decide what deserves your attention in a given week?
My beat is broad, at least within the scope of fintech, partly because I do a lot of explainers, and by nature, that form asks you to range across different concepts. These are a useful way to develop my own understanding as I go. As for what makes a story worth pursuing: I’m drawn to things that start niche and end up enormous. The example I always come back to is sovereign cloud. On the surface, it’s a B2B infrastructure story. But zoom out, and you’re in a debate about how much of the world’s cloud market is American-owned, what that means for EU trade relationships, what it means for national security. That’s the character of a story I go for, something jabbed into the ground of fintech that has massive consequences for everyone. In terms of process, I read the Guardian at weekends and work backwards: what’s happening at the national or international level, and how does it apply to the technology space? If I can show someone that even these little nerdy topics are having an impact on their life, I’ve brought them in.
Is there a topic you’ve been itching to cover but haven’t quite gotten to yet?
Prediction markets, and specifically Polymarket. It sits on exactly the kind of nexus I was just describing: on one level, it’s a fintech and digital-currency use-case story. But the longer tail is about how prediction markets are becoming increasingly linked to real-world events in unexpected ways. And then there are some genuinely strange ramifications. I read a story about someone who had tampered with an airport thermostat to influence the outcome of a temperature-based bet. That’s the range of it. Abstract and weird at one end, enormous at the other. I think this story is still unravelling.
Where do you see financial services journalism heading as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent?
I’d be cautious about predicting with any confidence. I think any forecast is going to feel crude pretty quickly. I sit on the council of the Chartered Institute of Journalists and chair a working group on AI, which was probably why I was brought in, given the tech reporting. And honestly, as an institute, we’re still working out a sensible response. We want to acknowledge that AI will cause job displacement, that’s true of any industrial revolution, but also that it has genuine benefits, particularly in a data-heavy field like financial services, where you could imagine it crunching numbers and producing reports with real precision. One idea we’re exploring is a kitemark system: a positive indicator that shows when and how AI has been used in a piece of content. The framing matters, flagging AI use as a transparent, constructive act rather than treating it as something to be ashamed of. That said, I think it’s still early days. I’d rather not pretend I know how it unfolds.
What’s the best pitch you’ve ever received, and what made it stand out?
I saw a meme on LinkedIn that sums up the worst pitch perfectly. There’s a row of twenty urinals. One man is standing at the far left. Another man enters and walks the full length of the room to stand directly beside him. Speech bubble says: “I have a press release for you.” That’s it. That’s the bad pitch. No regard for time, place, or context, just barging in. A good pitch is the opposite of that. It’s organic, and human, and well-timed, though I’ll admit timing is partly luck. I’ve rejected pitches that were genuinely good ideas simply because they landed on the wrong day, when I was deep in something else. So you need a strong pitch, and you need a bit of fortune. That’s probably not what PR people want to hear, but it’s the truth.
What’s one thing you wish PR professionals better understood when pitching to you?
Timing, mostly, and the fact that a rejection often has nothing to do with the quality of the pitch. I was in PR for five years before I crossed over, so I understand the hustle intimately. I know what a bad pitch looks like, and I know how demoralising it is to get ghosted. But a lot of it is genuinely out of your hands. You can send the best pitch in the world, and it lands on a day when I’m already committed to three other pieces. It’s not personal. What I’d say is: be human, be organic, and don’t treat it like a numbers game. The relationship matters more than the volume of outreach.
