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The World Economic Forum has just completed one of the most thoroughgoing studies into the effect of fintech on the financial services industry. Although ‘Beyond Fintech: A Pragmatic Assessment of Disruptive Potential in Financial Services’ isn’t the most imaginative title, the study contains over 150 interviews and accounts of ten international workshop sessions. The objective was to encourage collaborative dialogue to discuss insights and opportunities concerning fintech disruption within FS.
If you haven’t seen it, then I suggest you take a look as it provides an excellent summary of where fintech is right now and the specific threats and opportunities facing the banking and payment industries. For me, a few key points stood out:
How fintech has changed the industry
The report runs to nearly 200 pages, but when you read it you get the sense that while fintech companies have not yet been able to revolutionise the competitive landscape, they have laid the foundations for major change in the future.
Implications for banks and payments companies
These foundations present new and big challenges to the large institutions. One of fintech’s successes is to change the pace of technological advancement. The dynamics of our industry are changing at a speed few organisations have experienced, and for this reason I believe that one of the critical requirements for success faced by all large organisations will be the ability to manage development more rapidly. The challenge will take different forms:
Agility will be something discussed more frequently. I see too many projects delayed and running over budget because the skills, resources and technological capacity required to develop and implement them remain woefully inadequate. A growing list of companies have changed the way they work and recognised that agility will be critical. We all know of other industries that have failed to adapt to technological change and been slow to react. Think of Kodak, Atari and Nokia. But what does it take in financial services to become more agile?
Barriers to innovation
There are many barriers to innovation in banks and payment companies, but the main ones can be summarised as follows:
The result is that people become fearful of making changes as no-one can speak with total confidence about their effect. Those who can are limited by time so bottlenecks occur. How can you migrate to a new system or link to new technology under those circumstances?
Being successful in the fintech age
Making the right decisions on where to invest your IT budget will clearly be vital to success. But if you make the right decisions on how your company will develop, then your ability to deliver will become critical. The quickest way to remove the aforementioned barriers is to automate the test process. Automation eliminates waste and enables multiple teams across the world to test concurrently, and all the changes are stored, which removes the chance of future problems caused by insufficient documentation.
By contrast, manual approaches are clearly outmoded and out of step with the drive to digitalise, and more importantly they impede an organisation’s ability to keep pace with new competitors and the increasingly exacting demands of customers.
If you want to know more about all this, you can read the Finextra white paper which covers the topic in detail. It can be found here.
This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author.
Nick Green Director at Purple Patch Broking Ltd
22 August
Oleg Stefanet Chief Risk Officer at payabl.
20 August
Venkatesh P Co-Founder and Director at Maveric Systems
19 August
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