Fintech Innovation
Fintech innovation drives new business models, disrupts legacy systems, and reshapes global finance. Fintech Review highlights breakthrough technologies, strategic ideas, emerging startups, and market shifts that are accelerating change across banking, investment, payments, and financial services.
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Hedge Funds, Reddit and GameStop: is Fintech Democratizing Finance?
Quite a fascinating story that unfolded over the past weeks. A finance drama from films like the Big Short. David vs Goliath in the trading world with a “Rich against poor” vibe. An amazing saga to start 2021. Here is a quick recap if you have not followed. Which is particularly hard since everybody is…
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5 Top Trends for Fintech in 2021
It is this time of the year. No, not the Mariah Carey’s “All I want For Christmas Is You” time of the year. The moment just after that, when the year starts and everybody is trying to make predictions. This time around, it will be the 2021 trends for fintech. It is actually quite fun…
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2020 Retrospective
At the beginning of last year, everybody made a few predictions for what 2020 would mean for the fintech industry. Obviously, at that point in time, Covid-19 was only a problem in Wuhan, China. You could see it in the distance, and it appeared well under control. That slightly changed in the following months, and…
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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…
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Are Fintechs Better at Lending than Banks?
Banks have been lending money to people and businesses for a long, long time. A lot of the incumbent banks can trace their roots back to the 19th century. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which is the oldest bank in existence, was founded in 1472. Although they often rely on cranky processes and old…
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Can Fintech Help With Financial Inclusion?
One of the biggest premise of fintech, perhaps somehow implied, is that it would change banking for the better. You know the story: the year is 2009, greedy banks have created a massive mess. And that’s an understatement, just watch The Big Short (ad) for a quick recap. In the following years, fintechs will emerge…
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Top Fintech hubs in the world
By now, you should know who are the top European startups (more like big companies actually) in fintech. If you do not know them yet, you can have a look here. And you probably have heard of a few other well-known fintechs outside Europe like Stripe or the gigantic Ant Group (that is or is…
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Is Covid-19 killing Cash?
Everybody has heard the motto “Cash is King” right? But is it really? Or is it slowly dying and Covid-19 will be its final blow? The King is dead, long live the King. It depends on the kind of cash we are actually talking about. Covid-19 might not be killing cash. There are two types…
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Are Low Interest Rates Good for Banks and Fintechs?
As the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic takes its toll on economies around the world, central banks are cutting their base rates (or discount rates) to new lows. This is the rate at which a commercial bank can borrow from a central bank, like the Fed in the USA or the ECB in the Eurozone,…
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What it’s Like to Work in Fintech Today
Now that you know what Fintech is (and if not, have a quick read), we can have a look at what it’s like to work in Fintech today. Fintech is much more ‘Tech’ than it is ‘Fin’. It should actually be called ‘Techfin’ and not Fintech. Maybe not as brandable. As you must know now,…
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Will Fintechs be wiped out by Coronavirus?
The Coronavirus outbreak is disrupting lives across the world and is having a significant impact on the global economy. The damages are expected to be long-lasting, and the recovery very slow, most likely over a number of years. It could accelerate the death of cash. By some accounts, it could be the worst economic crisis…
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Is Peer-to-Peer Lending Facing a Reckoning?
Peer-to-peer lending has boomed in recent years, particularly in the US and the UK. And so has the funding funnelled to these companies. The VCs taking a particular interest in fintechs operating in the space. It had been also quite popular in China between 2011 and 2015, because lending there was really ripe for disruption.…
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What is Financial Technology?
Let’s start from the beginning. What do we really mean when we talk about Fintech? You will have obviously noticed that it is a very trendy topic these days. You will have read all about it in the press or elsewhere for sure. What is Financial Technology, better known Fintech then? To start with, Fintech…
