Fintech

One of my regular rants is that, even with all of this innovation and disruption with technology, no one has really reinvented banking and finance. The nearest we get are companies like Ant Group, PayTM, NuBank and a few others who are offering truly differentiated financial services, but the majority are just sorting out what…

I see five major groups squeezing the financial markets these days. The first one is obvious: it’s the FinTech start-up community, which is now valued as a third of all banking value. The second is clear too: it’s the Big Tech firms like Facebook and Amazon, who are launching their own currencies and putting pressure…

I was fascinated to see a lawsuit in America where a FinTech start-up (Onsa) claims a financial incumbent (Franklin Templeton) has stolen their ideas: Franklin Resources Inc. destroyed a blockchain startup to get its technology and a “short cut” into the booming fintech market, a group of investors claimed in a lawsuit. The startup, Onsa, claims…

I met with some friends the other day, who showed some stats that demonstrate that all FinTech is worth a third of all of the banking market worldwide. Source: CFTE’s Fintech Job Report [sum of largest 100 banks (market cap) vs sum of largest 100 Fintech companies (market cap + public valuations)] How times have changed. FinTech….

Brett King dropped a tweet the other day. It was followed up with a further list from Matthew Van Buskirk: I am sure there are many others!6. Transaction speed isn't important7. Cloud-based fintechs are inherently less secure8. Face to face or phone interactions are necessary for effective fraud control9. People want all of their financial…

I had a few recent experiences that showed me how bad developments are in the digital world today. One was trying to cancel a subscription to a news app and, when logging in online, couldn’t find anything to show me the answer. The second was my bank who changed my international bank account numbers but…

IPO-yay! It’s Fintech Float Season 🙂 Investment bankers must be lining their pockets as Fintech Float Season has arrived. After a decade of FinTech developments with a few floats, of which the biggest have been companies like Square and PayPal, who were recently worth more than Goldman Sachs and Bank of America respectively. Now, there are…

I was thinking about this article in The Telegraph saying what a rotten job supermarkets have made of competing with banks. Tesco sold its mortgage book to Lloyds two years ago owing to “challenging market conditions” and is now closing all personal current accounts. Marks & Spencer this year decided to close all of its bank…

I’ve blogged a bit about the Finverse – where the metaverse and crypto come together – and was reading Jemima Kelly’s column on the FT about the Metaverse and crypto. She states: As far as I’m concerned, the hypocritical fantasy that underpins crypto also lies at the heart of the metaverse. This isn’t about building…

Four years ago, I was using this slide in my presentations. As I blogged at the time: “Those who recognise that banks are doing 1000 things average, will naturally come together to do 1000 things brilliantly.” The idea was that FinTech start-ups would start to align with each other to create global platforms. The first…