John is a boat engineer. He designs the structures that keep vessels seaworthy — load, resistance, water pressure, the kind of work where “close enough” doesn’t hold up. We spent several weeks talking about his business before we talked about money at all: harbours, jurisdictions, a satellite connection that only ran in maritime mode. Somewhere in that conversation he went quiet, asked two precise questions, and then said something I haven’t stopped turning over since.
“I didn’t know this was available to me.”
He’d just realised that a professional life spent moving between countries and connectivity zones wasn’t only a source of friction. It was also, understood correctly, a source of financial options a business fixed to one office in one country doesn’t get. Nobody had hidden this from him. Nobody had ever framed his financial world in terms that connected to his actual life, so he’d spent years managing it the way you manage weather — absorbed, worked around, not thought about more than necessary.
That’s a rational response to a bad offer. It’s also the most expensive decision most competent business owners make, and they make it without noticing.
The UK keeps treating this as an information problem — a gap to be closed with a leaflet, a workshop, a “financial capability” module bolted onto onboarding. FutureDotNow puts the annual value of closing the UK workforce’s digital skills gap at £23 billion, a careful, well-sourced figure worth taking seriously on its own terms. Financial comprehension sits next to it, larger, and nobody has costed it at all. Parliament has just legislated a Financial Inclusion Strategy — November 2025 — and pencilled in primary-school financial literacy for 2028. That’s four more years of the current arrangement, for children who won’t be running businesses for another decade.
It isn’t that owners lack information. Most could define APR without blinking. What they lack is permission to think of financial fluency as something that belongs to them rather than something they’re behind on — and the entire architecture of financial education, from the school savings passbook onward, has been built to communicate the opposite. (Somewhere in most banks’ compliance departments there’s a jargon glossary — “what is EBITDA,” that sort of thing — commissioned with good intentions and read, if the analytics are honest, by almost nobody. It’s the inclusion model in miniature: keep the language exactly as it was, offer a dictionary, call it generosity.)
The gap has also changed shape underneath everyone. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s research puts deliberate AI adoption among UK SMBs at around 16%. Ask a different question — how many are using AI at all, embedded in the accounting software, the payments platform, the CRM that quietly added a scoring feature eighteen months ago — and the figure is closer to 70%. Most owners running AI-assisted businesses don’t know they are. Nobody voted on the sequence by which their bookkeeping software started deciding which invoices to chase first. It just accreted, release note by release note, until it was load-bearing.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty, in force since July 2023, now obliges firms to support customer understanding rather than simply disclosing information and hoping it lands. That’s a genuine shift, and firms have spent two years building the compliance architecture around it. Whether it produces an owner who can read their own merchant statement is still an open question, and open questions administered thoroughly are not the same as urgency.
None of this is a case against the technology. Open banking, live since January 2018, and algorithmic underwriting have done things a paper-based system never could. The problem sits one layer up, in who gets shown how any of it works, and on whose terms.
Waiting for government to close that gap has an obvious cost, which is time nobody currently short of financial fluency has to spare. The businesses with the most direct stake in fixing it — and the most direct evidence of what its absence costs them — are the ones best placed to do it now, without a 2028 deadline.
John messaged three weeks after our conversation. He’d found a tax adviser who specialised in maritime professionals. He’d restructured his invoicing — legally cleaner, operationally simpler than what he’d been doing for years. He’d found two AI tools that actually ran on maritime satellite, tools he’d never turned up before because he’d been searching the general market instead of his own. 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.
He supplied that metaphor himself, after the fact, better than I would have.
Yanka Golemin’s new book, Financially Wired: The SMB Owner’s Guide to the FinTech Era, is available now on Amazon.