Fintech News Issue #123 June 22nd, 2017

Would you stay with your cutting-edge bank or prefer to use four or five individual fintech companies? Most people would choose the convenient option of staying with their bank, right?

I just got back from the ICEEfest in Bucharest, Romania. It’s a fantastic expo organised by Dragos Stanca and his team, and was very enjoyable even with the master of ceremonies, Jeff Leach, taking the mickey out of me.

In the not so distant past, enterprise computing relied on monolithic applications to provide access to business functions within an organization. These applications strove to meet all operational requirements through rich and ever-growing feature sets—think ERP systems.

In 2015, Dave McKay, the chief executive of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), warned that traditional retail banks were on a “collision course” with the likes of tech giants like Apple and Google.

Essayist Brett King shares his vision of a future that is already at hand, in which banking will have to completely change its vision of the business: the important thing will no longer be products or distribution channels, but the customer experience.

“The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we’ve seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized.”

Banks should approach points of digital friction in the same way e-commerce giants do, if they want to hold onto their customers.

The number of social media users worldwide has reached 2.34 billion and is expected to grow to ~2.95 billion by 2020.

It’s become something of a cliché to say that chatbots are the new apps, but the notion is no longer fanciful. Last March, Microsoft released its Bot Framework, and the following month Facebook announced its support for bots in Facebook Messenger.

Open Banking enables third parties to develop new products and services through use of APIs. By working together and taking advantage of APIs, banks and fintech firms can leverage their complementary strengths, enhancing the customer experience much more than either entity could do on its own.

From the evolution of computer which could be the first variant of artificial intelligence (AI) with software logic and codes written, mobile transformation took place in early 2000's which provided another variant of AI.

One of the biggest stories in cryptocurrency over the past couple of months has been the meteoric rise of the ether price and the speculative frenzy around the Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) launching on top of the Ethereum platform.

Institutional clients are swimming in massive amounts of data that mere mortals can’t handle effectively.

When you have a really tough problem, it often helps to expand skill domains beyond specialists in a single field. Many believe it is just these kinds of unlikely combinations that are key to coming up with breakthroughs.

Insurance company Lemonade are turning the financial services industry head with their AI processes.

Ride sharing and self-driving vehicles will redefine our relationship with cars. Auto makers and startups are already gearing up for the change.