Beyond the Headlines: What the UK Fintech Funding Slump Really Means for Retail Chains in UK

Direct answer: UK fintech funding has dropped to its lowest level since 2016, but money hasn't left the sector — it has concentrated into fewer, AI-tied companies. For retail chains, this means the checkout, loyalty, and payments vendors you rely on will consolidate or slow their roadmaps, so you need to own more of your customer-facing mobile experience rather than depending entirely on third-party fintech tooling.

According to reporting from Bloomberg and Crowdfund Insider in August 2026, UK fintech funding has fallen to its lowest level since 2016, even as investors continue piling into AI-tied companies within the same broader tech investment pool. That is not a story about fintech disappearing — it's a story about capital getting choosier. Generalist payments apps, standalone buy-now-pay-later tools, and mid-tier banking infrastructure startups are struggling to raise, while anything with a credible AI angle is still finding cheques. For a UK retail chain, a meaningful share of your day-to-day operations — card processing, loyalty point calculation, fraud screening, in-store kiosk software, click-and-collect logistics — is built and maintained by exactly the kind of fintech vendors now facing a harder funding environment. When their runway tightens, their product roadmaps stall, their support quality drops, or they get acquired and re-platformed, and your customer never sees the funding headline — they just see your app being slower to add features, or a vendor sunset notice arriving with sixty days' notice. This post is about reading that trend correctly and deciding what to actually change about your website and mobile app strategy over the next twelve months.

What Is Actually Happening in UK Fintech Funding, and Why It's Real

It helps to separate two things that get conflated in headlines: "fintech funding is down" and "tech funding is down." They are not the same claim. The Bloomberg / Crowdfund Insider reporting from August 2026 is specific — UK fintech as a category has fallen to its weakest funding level since 2016, while capital allocated to AI-tied companies elsewhere in the UK tech ecosystem has kept climbing. That divergence is the actual signal.

Why capital is rotating, not retreating

Investors aren't suddenly pessimistic about digital payments or financial software as a category — plenty of fintech infrastructure is genuinely mature, profitable, and no longer needs venture-scale bets to grow. What's changed is that late-stage and growth-stage investors have a narrower thesis: they want defensible AI capability layered on top of existing infrastructure, not another undifferentiated payments rail or lending app competing on price. A fintech company pitching "faster checkout" in 2026 competes against a decade of "faster checkout" pitches that already raised and mostly plateaued. A company pitching "AI-driven underwriting" or "AI fraud detection with a defensible data moat" is pitching something investors haven't already seen fail to scale.

Why this specific squeeze matters more in the UK

The UK fintech sector is unusually dense — a large share of the retail payments, e-commerce checkout, and loyalty infrastructure used by UK chains was built by UK-headquartered fintech scale-ups rather than global platforms. That concentration cuts both ways. It's why the UK produced so many strong fintech products in the first place, and it's why a funding slowdown lands harder here than it would in a market more dependent on large incumbent banks and global platforms for the same infrastructure. When a mid-sized UK fintech vendor's Series C stalls, UK retail chains feel it faster than retailers in markets with more diversified vendor bases.

Why "lowest since 2016" is a meaningful benchmark, not just a headline number

It's worth sitting with what 2016 represents for UK fintech. That was still relatively early in the sector's growth curve — before challenger banks had fully scaled, before open banking regulation matured, before most of today's mainstream loyalty and BNPL platforms existed in their current form. Falling back to that funding level doesn't mean the sector's output has regressed to 2016 quality; the products built since then still exist and still work. What it means is that the rate of new capital entering the sector has fallen to a decade low, which affects forward-looking investment far more than it affects what's already been shipped. A vendor's existing product can keep functioning perfectly well while its ability to fund the next major version stalls. That distinction — existing product quality versus forward investment capacity — is exactly the gap retail chains need to watch for, because it's invisible until a renewal, an outage, or an acquisition notice makes it visible all at once.

Why This Matters Specifically for Retail Chains in the UK

Retail chains sit downstream of fintech in a way that's easy to underestimate until a vendor relationship breaks. Store operations software, loyalty programs, gift card platforms, in-app payment SDKs, and buy-now-pay-later integrations are almost never built in-house — they're licensed from specialist vendors who themselves depend on continued funding to keep improving the product you've built your checkout flow around.

The vendor dependency problem

A funding slump doesn't usually kill a vendor overnight. It shows up as slower release cycles, deprioritized support tickets, feature requests that used to ship in a quarter now taking a year, and eventually consolidation — a smaller fintech getting acquired by a larger one and its product line quietly sunset in favor of the acquirer's own stack. If your loyalty app, your click-and-collect payment flow, or your in-store kiosk software runs on a vendor now sitting in the "can't raise" half of this split, you may be one acquisition announcement away from a forced migration you didn't plan for and didn't budget for.

Why AI concentration changes vendor pricing power, too

The vendors still raising — the AI-tied ones — increasingly hold pricing power precisely because fewer alternatives are getting funded. A retail chain negotiating a renewal with a fintech vendor in a shrinking competitive field has less leverage than it did three years ago, when five well-funded startups were competing for the same contract. That's a quiet but real cost: less negotiating leverage on the very software that touches your revenue directly at checkout.

The customer-facing consequence

None of this stays behind the scenes for long. When a payments or loyalty vendor slows down, the visible result for your customers is a mobile app that stops improving — no new payment methods, no faster checkout, no personalization, while competitor chains that own more of their stack keep shipping. In UK retail specifically, where shoppers increasingly expect app-based loyalty, digital receipts, and one-tap repeat purchase, a stalled app experience is a competitive disadvantage that compounds every quarter it goes unaddressed.

Multi-store and multi-brand chains carry compounded exposure

If your retail chain operates several store formats or multiple brands under one parent company, the exposure isn't just about one vendor relationship — it's about how many separate vendor relationships you're running in parallel, each with its own funding risk profile. A chain running three brands might be licensing loyalty software from one vendor, checkout add-ons from another, and gift card infrastructure from a third, each of which sits somewhere different on the funding-stability spectrum. That fragmentation makes a single vendor audit more valuable, not less, because it's the only way to see the aggregate picture rather than reacting to each vendor relationship in isolation as problems surface one at a time.

What Changes in Practice for Your Website and Mobile App

The practical response isn't to panic-migrate every vendor relationship. It's to be deliberate about which parts of your customer experience you want directly owned and controlled, versus which parts you're comfortable continuing to license from a third party.

Audit vendor concentration risk before it's forced on you

Start with an honest map: which fintech vendors power your checkout, loyalty, and in-app payments, and how exposed is each one to this funding environment? A vendor that's profitable and self-funded is a different risk profile than one that raised a large round in 2021 and hasn't announced follow-on funding since. This is a one-afternoon exercise for most retail chains, and it should happen before a renewal negotiation, not during one.

Bring core customer experience in-house where it counts

The parts of your mobile experience that differentiate you competitively — loyalty mechanics, personalized offers, click-and-collect flow, the checkout UI itself — are strong candidates for owning directly through custom Mobile App Development rather than licensing wholesale from a third-party fintech SDK. This doesn't mean rebuilding payment processing or PCI compliance in-house — that's still best left to specialized, regulated infrastructure providers. It means the layer your customers actually touch and remember shouldn't be entirely dependent on a vendor's product roadmap surviving a tough fundraising year.

Rethink checkout and loyalty architecture for resilience

If you're planning a checkout or loyalty rebuild anyway, this is a reasonable moment to think about the underlying tech stack the way a direct-to-consumer brand would. The reasoning in Building a D2C Ecommerce Brand's Tech Stack From Scratch applies just as well to an established retail chain modernizing its stack — the goal is composability, so that if one vendor layer becomes unreliable, you can swap it without rebuilding the whole customer experience from scratch.

Don't overlook wholesale and B2B-facing systems

Many UK retail chains also run wholesale or bulk-ordering channels alongside consumer-facing retail, and those systems often depend on the same class of fintech vendors for invoicing, credit terms, and payment reconciliation. If that's part of your operation, it's worth reading how B2B Ecommerce: How Wholesale Buying Portals Differ From B2C Stores frames the different resilience requirements for that side of the business — wholesale buyers are far less forgiving of a broken payment flow than a browsing consumer, so vendor risk there deserves at least equal attention.

Keep accessibility and compliance in view during any rebuild

Any time you touch checkout or loyalty UI, it's an opportunity to fix accessibility debt at the same time rather than treating it as a separate project later. The practical guidance in Accessible Color Design: Contrast, Color Blindness, and WCAG Compliance is directly relevant if your current checkout flow was built years ago under a different vendor's design system and has never had a proper accessibility pass — bundling that work into a broader mobile app refresh is more efficient than doing it as a standalone compliance fire drill later.

Weigh the maintenance cost you're taking on before you decide to build

Owning more of your customer experience in-house isn't a free trade. Every module you bring in-house is a module your own team — or a development partner you retain a relationship with — now has to maintain, patch, and extend as payment methods, app store policies, and UK payment regulation evolve. The honest way to frame the decision isn't "vendor risk versus no risk," it's "vendor risk versus a different, more controllable kind of ongoing maintenance responsibility." For most retail chains, that trade is worth making for the handful of features that are genuinely core to the customer experience and revenue-critical, and not worth making for peripheral functionality where a stable, well-funded vendor already does the job well.

What Should Retail Chains Actually Do About This Now?

The honest answer is: not everything, and not all at once. Prioritize based on exposure, not anxiety.

Step one — map exposure, don't guess

Before commissioning any new development, get a clear-eyed view of which customer-facing fintech dependencies are the highest risk. A vendor that's central to checkout and shows funding warning signs is a higher priority than a peripheral tool used by a small fraction of stores.

Step two — decide build vs. license, deliberately

For each high-exposure dependency, make an explicit decision: continue licensing (with a documented fallback plan), or bring it in-house through custom mobile development. Neither answer is universally correct — the point is that the decision should be made deliberately now, not forced on you later by a vendor's acquisition announcement.

Step three — sequence the rebuild around revenue-critical flows first

Checkout and loyalty typically carry the highest customer-facing risk and the highest revenue sensitivity, so they're usually the right place to start if you decide to bring functionality in-house. Peripheral features — style quizzes, store locators, content sections — can wait.

Step four — build contractual protection into whatever you keep licensing

For every fintech dependency you decide to keep licensing rather than replace, use this moment to renegotiate the contract terms that matter most in a consolidating vendor market: data export rights, advance notice periods for product sunsets, and price-increase caps. These clauses cost you nothing to ask for today but become extremely valuable leverage if that vendor is later acquired or runs into funding trouble. A vendor confident in its own stability generally has no objection to including them; reluctance to commit to reasonable notice periods is itself a useful signal about how that vendor views its own runway.

Step five — revisit the plan annually, not once

This isn't a one-time exercise you complete and file away. Fintech funding conditions, vendor roadmaps, and your own retail chain's growth all shift year to year, so the vendor exposure map you build today should be revisited at least annually — ideally timed to align with major contract renewal windows so you're never negotiating from a position of surprise. Treating this as a standing part of your annual technology planning, rather than a one-off reaction to a single funding headline, is what actually protects you the next time a similar shift happens in the vendor landscape.

Pricing Context: What This Kind of Work Typically Falls Under

Bringing customer-facing checkout, loyalty, or app functionality in-house is a real engagement, and the right scope depends on how much of your current fintech dependency you're replacing versus supplementing. Here's how this kind of work typically maps to Scult's service tiers:

Tier	Typical scope for this scenario
Essential — $1,000	A single, well-defined feature: a native loyalty screen, a click-and-collect flow refresh, or an accessibility pass on existing checkout UI
Growth — $2,000	A broader mobile app update covering checkout UX, loyalty logic, and integration work with your existing payment processor
Enterprise — $4,000+	A full in-house rebuild of core customer-facing commerce flows across multiple stores or brands, including vendor migration planning

These are starting reference points, not fixed quotes — the right scope depends on how many vendor dependencies you're addressing and how many store formats or brands the app needs to serve. A chain that's only replacing a single loyalty screen sits comfortably at the lower end; a chain rebuilding checkout, loyalty, and gift card logic across several brands at once should expect to plan around the Enterprise tier from the outset, since vendor migration planning, data reconciliation, and testing across multiple existing systems add real scope beyond the feature work itself.

Key Takeaways

• UK fintech funding hitting its lowest level since 2016 is a concentration story, not a collapse — capital is rotating toward AI-tied companies, away from generalist fintech infrastructure.
• Retail chains are structurally exposed because so much of checkout, loyalty, and in-store payment software is licensed from fintech vendors now facing a tougher funding environment.
• The visible risk isn't a sudden outage — it's slower vendor roadmaps, weaker negotiating leverage on renewals, and eventual forced migrations after acquisitions.
• Map your fintech vendor exposure now, before a renewal or acquisition forces the decision on your timeline instead of yours.
• Bringing customer-facing checkout and loyalty experience in-house through dedicated mobile app development reduces dependency risk without requiring you to rebuild regulated payment infrastructure yourself.
• Any planned rebuild is a good moment to also address accessibility debt and wholesale-channel resilience while the underlying stack is already being touched.

If your checkout or loyalty experience currently depends entirely on a third-party fintech vendor and you want a clear-eyed view of where that exposure sits, book a meeting with our team.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "UK fintech funding at its lowest level since 2016" actually mean?

It means the total capital invested into UK-based fintech companies has dropped to a level not seen in roughly a decade, based on Bloomberg and Crowdfund Insider reporting from August 2026. It reflects fewer and smaller funding rounds across the sector, not a single company or event.

Does this mean fintech companies are shutting down?

Not necessarily in large numbers — many are mature enough to be profitable without further venture funding. The bigger risk is slower product development, delayed features, and a higher likelihood of consolidation through acquisition rather than outright shutdowns.

Why are AI-tied companies still attracting investment when fintech overall isn't?

Investors are looking for defensible technical advantages rather than incremental improvements to established categories like payments or lending. A company with a credible AI capability layered on financial infrastructure is seen as more differentiated than another generalist payments product.

How does this trend affect a retail chain that doesn't build its own fintech products?

Retail chains are consumers of fintech products, not producers, so the effect is indirect but real — the vendors powering your checkout, loyalty, and payments experience are the ones facing this funding pressure, which can slow their roadmaps and reduce your negotiating leverage.

Should I be worried about my current payment processor going out of business?

Large, established payment processors are generally the least exposed to this trend since many are already profitable and not dependent on venture funding cycles. The greater risk sits with smaller, newer fintech vendors handling loyalty, BNPL, or niche checkout add-ons.

What's the first thing a retail chain should do in response to this trend?

Map which customer-facing fintech vendors you depend on and assess each one's funding stability and roadmap momentum. This gives you a prioritized list rather than a vague sense of risk.

Is it realistic for a mid-sized UK retail chain to build its own checkout experience?

Yes, particularly the customer-facing UI and loyalty logic layered on top of an existing, compliant payment processor. You're not rebuilding PCI-compliant payment infrastructure from scratch — you're building the experience layer your customers actually interact with.

How long does it typically take to rebuild a loyalty or checkout flow in-house?

It depends heavily on scope, but a focused feature like a native loyalty screen can often be scoped and delivered within a matter of weeks, while a full checkout and loyalty rebuild across multiple store formats is a longer, multi-month engagement.

What's the difference between licensing fintech software and building it in-house?

Licensing means you depend on a vendor's roadmap, pricing, and continued existence for a feature your customers rely on daily. Building in-house means you own the update cycle and aren't exposed to a vendor's funding or acquisition risk, though you take on the ongoing maintenance responsibility yourself.

Does bringing checkout in-house mean handling card data directly?

No — it's strongly advisable to continue routing actual payment processing and card data handling through a regulated, PCI-compliant payment processor. In-house development typically focuses on the UI, loyalty logic, and customer experience layer that sits on top of that processor.

What happens if my loyalty app vendor gets acquired?

Acquisitions often lead to product line consolidation, where the acquired product gets sunset in favor of the acquirer's own platform, sometimes with as little as sixty to ninety days' notice. Having a migration plan ready before this happens is far cheaper than reacting to it.

How can I tell if a fintech vendor I use is at risk?

Signs include a lack of recent funding announcements relative to their last known round size, slowing release cadence, reduced support responsiveness, and leadership or team departures. None of these are certain indicators, but together they build a useful risk picture.

Is this funding slump specific to the UK, or is it happening everywhere?

The reporting specifically highlights the UK fintech sector falling to its lowest funding level since 2016. Other markets may show different patterns, and UK retail chains with international operations should check regional vendor exposure separately.

Why does the UK have more exposure to this than other retail markets?

The UK has an unusually dense fintech ecosystem, meaning a larger share of UK retail payments and loyalty infrastructure was built by UK-based fintech scale-ups rather than global platforms, so a UK-specific funding slowdown has an outsized local effect.

What does "AI-tied" mean in the context of these still-funded companies?

It generally refers to companies whose core product or competitive advantage is built around AI capabilities such as fraud detection, underwriting automation, or personalization, rather than fintech companies simply adding AI as a marketing feature.

Could my retail chain build an AI-tied fintech capability itself?

Some retail chains are exploring AI-driven personalization, fraud screening, or recommendation logic within their own apps, which can be developed as part of a broader mobile app engagement rather than requiring you to become a fintech company yourself.

How does this trend affect buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) providers specifically?

BNPL has historically been one of the more competitive, VC-funded fintech subcategories, so BNPL providers without a clear AI differentiation may be among the more exposed to this funding pull-back, which is worth factoring into any BNPL vendor renewal.

What should I ask my current fintech vendor at the next contract renewal?

Ask directly about their funding runway, recent investment activity, and product roadmap commitments for the next twelve months. A vendor confident in its stability will typically answer this without hesitation.

Does this affect gift card and store credit platforms too?

Yes, if those platforms are run by smaller fintech vendors rather than built in-house or run through a large established processor, they carry the same category of funding and consolidation risk as loyalty and checkout vendors.

How does a stalled vendor roadmap actually show up for my customers?

It typically shows up as slower feature releases, fewer supported payment methods, clunkier checkout flows compared to competitors, and a general sense that the app "hasn't changed in a year" while rival chains keep shipping improvements.

Is now a bad time to sign a new long-term fintech vendor contract?

Not necessarily, but it's a good time to negotiate shorter contract terms or clearer data portability and exit clauses, given the higher likelihood of vendor consolidation over the next few years.

What's the risk of doing nothing and just waiting this out?

The risk is that a vendor issue — a sunset notice, a price increase from reduced competition, or a service degradation — forces a rushed migration on a timeline you don't control, which is typically far more expensive and disruptive than a planned transition.

How does mobile app ownership improve negotiating leverage with fintech vendors?

If your core customer experience isn't entirely dependent on a single vendor's proprietary SDK, you have a credible alternative to point to during renewal negotiations, which changes the dynamic considerably in your favor.

What's a reasonable first project to test bringing functionality in-house?

A single, well-scoped feature — such as a native loyalty points screen or a streamlined click-and-collect payment step — is a good way to validate the approach without committing to a full platform rebuild upfront.

How does accessibility fit into a checkout or loyalty rebuild?

A rebuild is an efficient moment to fix contrast, color-blindness, and WCAG compliance issues in the same pass, rather than treating accessibility as a separate project after the fact, which typically costs more overall.

What role does wholesale or B2B ordering play in this trend?

Retail chains with a wholesale or bulk-ordering channel often depend on similar fintech vendors for invoicing and payment reconciliation, and that channel deserves its own resilience review since business buyers are less tolerant of payment disruptions than retail shoppers.

How do I estimate the cost of bringing a feature in-house versus continuing to license it?

Compare your current and projected vendor licensing fees over two to three years against a one-time development cost plus modest ongoing maintenance — for many mid-sized retail chains, in-house ownership becomes cost-competitive faster than expected once vendor price increases are factored in.

Will building in-house features require an entirely new app?

Not usually — most in-house features can be integrated into your existing mobile app incrementally, replacing specific vendor-dependent modules rather than requiring a ground-up rebuild.

What's the risk of over-reacting and migrating away from stable vendors unnecessarily?

Migrating away from a genuinely stable, well-funded vendor purely out of caution wastes budget and introduces unnecessary risk — the point of a vendor audit is to focus effort only on genuinely exposed dependencies.

How quickly can Scult help assess my current fintech vendor exposure?

A focused review of your current checkout, loyalty, and payment vendor stack can typically be scoped within an initial consultation, after which a recommended path — continue licensing, partial in-house build, or full rebuild — can be outlined.

Does this trend affect fraud detection and chargeback tools used by retail chains?

Fraud detection is one of the categories where AI-tied vendors are still attracting investment, so retail chains using fraud tools from AI-focused providers are less likely to see disruption than those using more generic, non-AI fraud tools from smaller vendors.

What happens to customer data if a fintech vendor is acquired or shuts down?

This depends entirely on your contract terms regarding data ownership and portability, which is exactly why negotiating clear data export and ownership clauses matters more in a consolidating vendor landscape.

Is it worth consolidating multiple fintech vendors into fewer relationships?

For some retail chains, yes — fewer vendor relationships can mean less aggregate exposure to individual funding risk, though it can also concentrate risk into fewer, larger dependencies, so this needs to be weighed case by case.

How does this affect click-and-collect and in-store pickup flows specifically?

Click-and-collect often relies on real-time payment and inventory syncing through third-party integrations, so a vendor slowdown there can directly affect one of the most operationally sensitive parts of a retail chain's customer experience.

What's the typical timeline to see ROI from bringing checkout functionality in-house?

This varies by retail chain size and current vendor costs, but many chains see the licensing-fee savings and improved conversion from a smoother, in-house checkout experience begin offsetting development costs within the first one to two years.

Should smaller regional UK retail chains worry about this as much as national chains?

Smaller chains often have less negotiating power with fintech vendors to begin with, so a consolidating vendor landscape can actually affect them more acutely, making an early vendor audit especially worthwhile.

How does this trend intersect with UK payment regulation changes?

Regulatory shifts and funding trends are separate forces, but a fintech vendor under funding pressure may be slower to adapt to new UK payment regulations, which is an additional reason to assess vendor stability before regulatory deadlines arrive.

Can a retail chain's own app development team handle this in-house, or is external help usually needed?

It depends on your existing team's mobile and payments integration experience — many retail chains without dedicated in-house mobile teams find it faster and lower-risk to bring in a specialized development partner for this kind of work.

What questions should I ask before signing with a new fintech vendor today?

Beyond standard due diligence, ask specifically about their funding history, current runway, and contingency plans if they're unable to raise again, since that context is now more relevant than it was a few years ago.

Does this affect subscription or membership-based retail models differently than standard retail?

Subscription and membership models often depend more heavily on recurring billing and loyalty fintech tooling, so they may face slightly higher exposure if their billing vendor is among the smaller, less-funded players in the category.

How should I prioritize which fintech dependency to address first?

Prioritize based on a combination of customer-facing revenue impact and vendor risk signals — a high-revenue-impact dependency on a shakier vendor should come before a low-impact dependency on a stable one.

What's a realistic budget range for a full in-house checkout and loyalty rebuild?

For most mid-sized UK retail chains, this kind of engagement typically falls into the Enterprise tier starting around $4,000, scaling with the number of store formats, brands, and existing integrations involved.

Will this trend reverse, and should I just wait for fintech funding to recover?

Funding cycles do shift over time, but betting your customer experience on a funding recovery timeline you can't control is riskier than making incremental improvements to reduce dependency now.

How does mobile app performance tie into this trend at all?

If a vendor-dependent checkout or loyalty module is poorly optimized and the vendor isn't prioritizing performance improvements, that directly affects your app's speed and conversion, which is a tangible, measurable cost of vendor stagnation.

What's the best way to communicate a vendor migration to customers if one becomes necessary?

Plan the migration to be as invisible as possible from the customer's perspective — ideally preserving login credentials, loyalty balances, and saved payment methods — and only communicate proactively if the transition requires any customer action.

Are there compliance risks specific to migrating away from a fintech vendor?

Yes — data protection, PCI compliance, and UK financial conduct considerations all need to be accounted for during any migration, which is why migration planning should start well before a forced deadline.

How does this trend relate to the broader AI investment boom happening in 2026?

It's part of the same broader pattern — investors are reallocating capital toward AI-differentiated companies across many sectors, and fintech is simply one visible example where that reallocation shows up clearly in the funding data.

Should retail chains be building their own AI features into their mobile apps now?

Many retail chains are starting to explore AI-driven personalization and recommendations within their own apps, and this can be a reasonable parallel initiative alongside addressing fintech vendor dependency, though it should be scoped as its own project.

What's the single most important action a UK retail chain should take this quarter?

Complete a vendor exposure audit for every fintech tool touching checkout, loyalty, and payments, and use that audit to decide — deliberately, not reactively — which dependencies are worth bringing in-house first.

How do I get started with Scult on this?

The most direct next step is a conversation about your current vendor stack and where the highest-risk dependencies sit, which you can set up by choosing to book a meeting with our team.