Fintech: Rebooting Financial Services

FINEXTRA: Having occupied relatively safe niches, such as payments and P2P-lending, fintech companies are now moving toward the core banking business. For them it is a multi-billion dollar opportunity to reinvent the financial services, but they won’t cope without the support of the current banking industry, according to the report by Santander InnoVentures, Oliver Wyman and Anthemis Group. Read the report 

Project Syndicate: Steadily and indisputably, the financial services industry – with which we all interact, whether as borrowers, savers, investors, or regulators – has embarked on a multiyear transformation. This process, slow at first, has been driven by the combined impact of two sets of durable forces. On one hand, top-down factors – regulatory change, unusual pricing, and what Nouriel Roubini has cleverly termed the “liquidity paradox” – are at work. Then there are disruptive influences that percolate up from below: changing customer preferences and, even more important, outside visionaries seeking to transform and modernize the industry.

Beginning at the top, the regulatory pendulum is still swinging toward tighter supervision of traditional financial institutions, particularly large banks and insurance companies deemed “systemically important.” Moreover, re-designed regulatory frameworks, phased implementation, and stepped-up supervision will gradually extend to other segments, including asset management. This will contribute to further generalized de-risking within the regulated sectors, as part of a broader financial-sector movement toward a “utilities model” that emphasizes larger capital cushions, less leverage, greater disclosure, stricter operational guidelines, and a lot more oversight. Read the full article

Read also:

B4TDigital Bank or FinTech? You’re not a digital bank… By Brett King, CEO Moven

McKinsey: Last September, McKinsey released a report overviewing the need to modernize payments

Techcrunch, Ripple: McKinsey: Why Banks Should Invest in Payments Infrastructure

The Age: Australian bank customers are among the world’s fastest adopters of mobile banking, a trend that is predicted to make the big four prime targets for technology-based firms eyeing banks’ huge profits. Mobile banking has overtaken online banking through a desktop computer as the main way for customers to interact with their bank, and Australian consumers are leading the charge, consultancy Bain & Company says. Read the full article

The Telegraph: Britons are now checking their bank balance on their mobile phones more than anywhere else, leaving more traditional services like a visit to the high street branch in decline. Banking apps were used10.5m times a day across the country in March, eclipsing the 9.6m daily log-ins to internet banking services, and both services are still growing rapidly, according to data from the British Bankers’ Association. Read the full article