Tag: Startups
-
Kodak Moment in Financial Services
Business leaders want to avoid their Kodak moment. That is true for the executive teams of traditional financial institutions. Actually, of any established company. A Kodak moment used to signify “an occasion suitable for memorializing with a photograph“. How cute. And that is how big Kodak was. Now it means missing an industry shift in…
-
How is the International Money Transfer Market Evolving? Interview with Subhash Chander
There is a lot of activity going on in the international money transfer market. Beyond TransferWise rebranding to Wise. The foreign exchange market is the largest financial market in the world. Much larger than the stock market, with a daily volume of $6.6 trillion. Yes, trillion as in thousands of billions. Mind-numbing numbers. Money going…
-
Back to Basics: What is a Bank?
Maybe that sounds like a silly question to ask. You know what a bank is, you use their products and services almost every day. Most people have a bank account. Unfortunately not everybody. Nonetheless, it’s probably worth breaking it down for a minute. If you want to understand what fintechs are trying to disrupt, it’s…
-
21 Women in Blockchain You Should Know About
Today is International Women’s Day. To celebrate that, we are going a bit further than just fintech. To the extent that every company will eventually be a fintech company according to Andreessen Horowitz, we actually are always in fintech territory… Today, we recognise the achievements of business leaders and innovators across a range of industries.…
-
What’s going on with fintech startup exits?
All the SPAC activity around fintechs is kind of normal. If you have not followed this new craze, here is a good recap from CB Insights. The huge amount of money going into fintechs needed an exit of some sort. When VCs give you some cash to build a business, they expect a return. As…
-
Venture Capital in Blockchain: Interview with Baptiste Cota
There has been a lot of hype around blockchain technology for years now. Notably because of bitcoin, ever since Satoshi Nakamoto published his white paper in 2008. What the technology could do that would completely change the world. It was hailed as potentially truly transformative for the financial services industry. Maybe it will in time…
-
ESG and Fintech: a perfect match made in heaven?
It’s not just Greta. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria are increasingly important in the business world. ESG is therefore more and more important in fintech. If you want to be cynical, that’s because it is more and more important for these businesses’ customers. So you need to adapt to continue to sell your stuff.…
-
Big Tech in Financial Services
Beware, Big Tech is here to eat your lunch. That is today’s equivalent for the financial services industry of the great communist threat during the Cold War. What’s behind “Big Tech” then? Usually, we mean FAMGA: Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Some people instead look at FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Or…
-
Why banks cannot buy their way into innovation
Recent news that BBVA is shutting down neobank Simple, that it had acquired for $117 million a few years ago, is telling us one thing: banks cannot buy their way into innovation. It is a pity because at the time of the acquisition in 2014, Simple was a neobank at the forefront of the US…
-
What’s FinTel? Interview with Andy Hallam
Everybody hopes that 2021 will be slightly better than the year we have just had. Not that everything was bad, especially for fintech that has proven resilient. Fintechs were not wiped out in numbers by the pandemic. Good startups managed to raise big funding rounds and products hit the market at pace. But before we…