Bank 4.0

6FinTech and TechFin: Friend or Foe?

As […] technologies develop and season, they’re going to create a totally different way of doing banking and financial services. Now we will see the possibility—not necessarily the probability—of what we call a “Kodak moment”, where increasingly banks become irrelevant to their customers. —Antony Jenkins, Former CEO of Barclays, founder of FinTech startup 10x Future Technologies

If you go to Google and type in FinTech, among the top automated search terms that appear are “FinTech killing banks”, “FinTech disrupting banks”, “will FinTech replace banks”. If you follow through on such searches you’ll find pages and pages of news stories from the major financial news outlets, along with blogs, press releases and so forth proclaiming that, yes, FinTech will kill banks. But then you’ll equally find a plethora of articles showing that it’s all much ado about nothing and banks are not only up to the challenge, but will outlive the “fad” of FinTech. Some will argue this is a zero-sum game, that it will all work out with FinTechs and banks living in some sort of technological harmony once the dust settles. The truth is somewhat more complex.

Will FinTech (or TechFin) kill banks? Most certainly some banks, but not all. Will banks (or regulators for that matter) kill some FinTechs? Absolutely, but again, the FinTechs that succeed will become an established part of the future of financial services and, as Antony Jenkins forecasted above, FinTechs ...