Fintech News Issue #64 April 20th, 2016

Liz Lumley hosts, with JP Nicols as her wingman. Guests include Matthias Kroner, CEO of Fidor; Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance; Anju Patwardhan, Global Chief Innovative Officer, Standard Chartered Bank;

Peter Jackson, Chief Innovative Officer, Santander; Eileen Burbidge, VC at Passion Capital; and Wendy Jephson, CEO/Founder of Sybenetix.

These are some of the best and brightest innovators in banking and FinTech! Don’t miss!

We interviewed Raj Singh and Jürgen Hütter from online lender Avant about the reasons alternative lenders gain ground, why the US offers better prerequisites for the business and what the bank of the future will look like.

Some of the world’s leading bankers are calling for more collaboration to benefit from fintech’s potential and better manage its risks.

In just 10 years, we can expect banks (and other financial institutions) to look, from the outside, like a vastly different organization: a technology startup. That doesn’t mean branches will offer nap pods and catered lunches; rather, your bank will have placed newfound emphasis on the design and customer experience paradigm that has changed while retail banking has been playing catch-up.

Talking about transformation at conferences every day gets you into a mantra. My mantra is leadership and how banks lack technological leadership. The pushback is that you have too many technologists without banking knowledge. We need banks run by people who understand money, and they can tell the technologists what to do.

Blockchain (distributed ledger) technology is at the height of the hype cycle. VC funding so far has exceeded $1 billion. Banks, payment and clearing systems, government agencies and service providers have also invested strongly. Many of the largest banks are exploring, experimenting, testing and even piloting blockchain applications.

Bank executives have a new vision of the future, and fintech firms are in it, according to a recent study. The 2016 World Retail Banking Report, an annual study from Capgemini and Paris-based banking industry association Efma, found that the attitudes of bank executives toward fintech firms has shifted in the past 12 months. More bank executives see nimble fintech as potential partners as well as potential foes.

This study exposes the mounting tension between old and new delivery channels: traditional branches vs. digital self-service. Are consumers really ready to ditch bricks for clicks?

According to a report, mobile commerce is estimated to reach $278.9 billion by 2018. With this increase, there comes a shift in the way we make payments across the globe. There will be an estimated 2.55 billion users of social networks by 2017 according to a report by eMarketer.

Bankers want modern cores — but most don’t plan to do anything about it. That’s the slightly depressing conclusion of a recent study by NTT Data Consulting, formerly known as Carlisle & Gallagher.

Closing off our Fintech A to Z, we look at fintech’s verification challenges, its gender gap and the opportunities within the youth market.

I’m often talking about Victorian visions of the future to illustrate the issue we have today. The Victorian vision of the future was dealing with a number of problems, one of which was horse shit. Manure. Manure was a massive issue. Victorian Britain had too many horses and carriages on the streets, and the horses produced lots of manure.

Perhaps slightly late in the day, the major banks have woken up to that threat, and have started to respond with a hurricane of investments, either trying to create their own platforms, or else partner with one of the fast-growing new challengers. The strategy is fairly clear – if you can’t beat them, join them.