FinTech News Issue #39 October 28th, 2015

The looming giant in the FinTech industry is the Asian sectors. The potential for a new customer base and growth is enormous and FinTech companies are increasing focus on the sector in the effort to reach billions of new customers.

Chris Skinner outlines the innovator to incumbent cycle, when business models are understood, regulated and become compliant. [Skip to parts two and three at the end of this article]

Cameron Peake looks at emerging trends in ecommerce that will impact digital financial services.

What is fueling this growth and success? In many ways, it’s a perfect storm – a confluence of factors that merge together to create a powerful front sweeping through financial services. Here are the nine key factors fueling this Fintech storm:

I seem to be getting more and more interviews out there, and this one was published by Octo after a recent conference in Paris where I keynoted. Many folks seem to like the interview, so I thought it worth reproducing here.

With McKinsey projecting fintechs to take as much as 60% of banks’ retail profits in the future, it’s not surprising that the financial industry is scrambling to retain customers every way it can. However, traditional financial institutions still expect consumers to come to them: fintech’s great strength is to adapt to consumers.

Until a few years ago, financial institutions were a relatively closed shop. Product developers worked behind the scenes for years on new products and services for the market, which were extensively tested and then presented to the outside world.

Startups are playing a larger role in the world of financial services, and that’s clear from the agenda at Money20/20, being held this week in Las Vegas.

We spoke to attendees at Money 20/20 to ask them their views on payment trends, predictions for the coming year and what the ideal payments ecosystem looks like.

A cycle starts when hype of a technology leads to big investments in that technology, which in turn creates more hype. Real-world use of the technology by customers can get lost in the cycle.

There are 200 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) worldwide that have no access to formal financial services. This represents a $2 billion gap of funds for capital investments and working capital to increase their growth prospects.

The rapidly growing financial-technology sector (FinTech) has made many headlines in 2015, especially regarding the impact it has been having on the culture of the global-banking industry.

From the outside, the tech industry can look like a homogenous sector, populated either by entrepreneurial whiz kids or bearded computer ‘geeks’.

New technologies have shown to be a driving force behind new business cases. Most of the time, however, banks are not really pioneers regarding these kind of changes.