It’s neither win nor lose but integration

Fintechs, perhaps surprisingly, don’t see a future where they have won and incumbent players have lost.

J.P. Morgan says “challenger banks expense bases are every very well developed and their revenue channels or their ideas for how to monetize their customers are very, very underdeveloped.”

“By far the most popular [business strategy] has been ‘we’re going to get tons of customers and we’ll figure it out later.”

This could be one reason and another one is that incumbents are also adapting to changes and responding to them with new innovative products.

Fintechs predict that incumbents will be platforms that provide the scale for fintechs to reach every potential customer.

There’s division over how exactly this will work — some see banks curating services while others think banks will simply be a conduit between customers and other, better service providers.

With embedded finance, there’s an opportunity to go further, for example creating managed software that is aimed at microsegments in the market. Or big technology companies embedding finance in their consumer offerings, making payments as simple as sending a text or voice note.

As finance becomes more embedded fintechs will become less and less visible over the decade. The Internet of Things, machine learning, and automation was predicted to attract more funding, while retail banking will attract far less.

The future of fintech is not in burning through VC cash in order to attract consumers directly, but in providing the technology that quietly creates a compelling experience for the end-user, through brands they already know and trust.