Fintech News Issue #211 April 4th, 2019

Former SBA Administrator Karen Mills, Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School, discusses her new book, "Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream." Hosted by Lisa Abramowicz and Paul Sweeney.

Fintech (financial technology) is widely seen as a disruptive force in the banking industry. New information-technology (IT)-focused entrants, including large data and platform-oriented IT firms such as Google and Apple, are seen as a potential threat to the position of banks.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that banks and fintech startups mix about as well as oil and water. And on one hand, there’s some truth in that. Ever since small, agile fintechs began emerging, many regulatory bodies and traditional financial institutions have regarded them with suspicion—if not outright hostility.

How are neobanks changing the face of financial services? How will their sudden and meteoric rise to prominence impact the retail banking landscape? Will banks - as we understand the term today -still exist in five years time?

Jack Ma famously called Alibaba and their tech giant peer group – TechFins, declaring their intention to sneak into financial services. Banks were too focused on their battle with Fintechs then, that they perhaps were blindsided by the rise of TechFins.

In what has been described as a hard-fought legal battle the 13th District Court of New York issued a clear victory for the group known as the Fintech Mafia today over a multi-year legal dispute with the US Patents and Trademark Office in Washington.

Malaysian banks are keeping up with some of the global trends in financial technology (fintech), with developments in payments, compliance and lending, says Alvin Gan (picture), executive director of management consulting for IT-enabled transformation at KPMG in Malaysia.

Fintech companies and a few other lenders see this segment as an untapped market opportunity It is unhealthy for the fintech if they don’t analyse and have segment-wise interest rates

Fintech was the #1 sector of venture capital investments in Latin America last year, and experts are estimating that the LatAm fintech market will exceed $150 billion by 2021. Why is this market suddenly growing so rapidly? The answer lies within the unique fintech startups that have sprouted throughout the region in recent years.

Just since months after raising $7 million in Series A funding, German SME banking provider Penta has been acquired by Finleap. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand that the acquisition sees Finleap and Penta’s co-founders becoming the challenger bank’s sole owners, with all other shareholders exiting.

Financial services and technology might be an odd couple but through their unison we saw the birth of Fintech which is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as: “Computer programmes and other technology used to support or enable banking and financial services.”