What alignment of the sun, moon and stars is causing FinTech Storm to descend on the finance industry?
Is this just about bitcoin or the technology behind it – Distributed Consensus Ledger? Is this just happening in the retail finance space and connected with new banks like Atom Bank and Starling Bank? Or can corporate treasurers expect new and relevant services to be offered to them in the areas causing pain (that is real pain, and not ISO20022 payment initiation messaging)?
It is a confusing and, one suspects, hyped-up picture but governments and regulator are seriously interested in opening up financial markets to innovation and new players, to lead on to intensified competition, lower prices and better services.
The first wave has come via alternative finance sources such as Peer-to-Peer lenders and supply chain finance providers. The second wave is challenger banks – new-builds and spin-offs from the Big Five – and new payment service companies in the form of FX bureaux, money remitters and eMoney. From 2017 we will see the two further new classes of payment service companies: Account Information Service Providers and Payment Initiation Service Providers. Will they be genuinely new, or a pastiche of Fides Mark III, ChemLink redux, and GeisCo in-the-cloud?
Corporate treasurer pain points remain as ever: opening foreign bank accounts, managing bank account mandates, information on the cost of bank services, getting a comprehensive and accurate view of global liquidity, running homogenous payment and collection processes, and connecting wholesale FX dealings to the daily business.
Filtering out from the many new offerings those ones capable of solving these pain points will be the treasurer’s key challenge in FinTech Storm.
[su_box title="Shelter from the storm" box_color="#51284F" radius="1"]To help you make sense of it all and prepare for disruption in financial services – from challenger banks to digitised processes – join me on 22 November for a truly inspiring ACT training session that will ensure you are ready for the storm that is coming.
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