TOP FINTECH STORIES 08/28/15
In a week of international market turmoil and drama, FinTech news looks toward a more cooperative future. The ongoing and potential future relationship between banks and tech firms gets a more realistic treatment in this week’s articles.
The Evolution of Fintech: A Story That Keeps Speeding Up
Digital FinTech may hold the technological future of financial services, but it’s built on years of IT systems and even innovations. This article from Silicon Republic gives an overview of how far we’ve come, where we’ve come from, and what the current landscape looks like.
Getting to Strategic Value in Partnerships Between Fintech Ventures and Banks
Banks and their FinTech disrupters are getting closer together. Bernard Lunn’s DailyFintech gives cogent advice to FinTech firms seeking partnerships with banks. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” timeless advice from Steven Covey’s famous 7 Habits. The overarching point: don’t describe yourself as disruptive to the folks you’re disrupting.
Five Legal Threats for Fintech’s Hottest Start Ups
The nature and necessity of partnerships will arise from what the regulators say, as much as anything. “But more than any other, the winners and losers in the “big bang” disruption of financial services will be determined by how government regulators apply laws that may go back a hundred years or more,” writes The Washington Post in its summary of legal roadblocks in the way of further FinTech development.
A Bank for People Who Hate Banks
The leaders in both FinTech investment and partnerships with financial institutions clearly are the British. Mondo, a “bank for people who hate banks” currently is making interesting progress toward being London’s newest and most tech-savvy bank. “We are targeting a demographic that values being able to do everything over a mobile phone in five seconds,” says CEO Tom Blomfield, in an interesting interview with Bloomberg.
Creating the Fintech Dream in Financial Services
Writing in BAI’s Banking Strategies, Chris Skinner reminds us that bankers are not the slow, backwards folks that some FinTech supporters portray them as. They have legacy systems to tackle and may best be advised to step away from thinking they need young blood and simply change a few key assumptions. Given that this was Banking Strategies most read article of the week, it appears that bankers are listening.
Subscribe To BAI’s Banking Strategies
Facebook Wants To Redline Your Friends List
“The company recently filed a patent on using social network data to influence lending decisions. God help us all.” PSMag takes this potential data issue and blows it out in scope. Not necessarily foretelling doom, but serving as a fair reminder that while harvesting personal data from tech companies can go a long way to helping banks, without a careful touch it could be devastating to their customers.
BONUS: The Blockchain Size Debate: A primer
What Is The Bitcoin Block Size Debate and Why Does It Matter?
Bitcoin, ever in the spotlight, has been undergoing a heated debate as they prepare for wider use, a debate that raises important questions about the technology that drives it and the people they ultimately want using it. Coindesk breaks down the tech behind the argument and lays out the repercussions of the various arguments.