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This is great news for Wells' shareholders and customers. There is a lot innovation that can occur. At the end of the day it is all about data and wrapping analytics around it in a dynamic environment.

These types of choices are interesting but they do need to be grounded with banking data SME's who know banking data -- what type of data, where is it, what does it do ..............

ATM transaction volumes in mature economies are decreasing as the demand for cash decreases. This creates a real problem from a productivity perspective. As volumes go down and costs remain constant transaction unit costs go up. Any ideas on how to reverse this trend?

Wow! This is a big deal. It provides growth to MoneyGram, and gives Ant Financial a global channel for cross border payments and new services in the future.

I am not buying the Fintech argument on this one. Why would anyone in their right mind want to give away consumer data. The data ia more valuable than the money in the vault. Remember the Dire Straits song with the lyrics, "Get your money for nothing and your chicks for.......". I remember when a company give away its operating system for pc's to a much smaller one. Now that smaller one is the bigger fish.

As a former banker I tried to attract the so called unbankables with all types of innovative things. The net net was I was not successful not because I was not innovative. Basically, it was due to the fact that this segment just did not want to get discovered. Bottom-line is that they were part of the huge illegal base on immigrates. I would expect more oversight and regulations regarding any financial solutions that provide services to the "illegals" in the U.S..

One of the biggest consequences of the great recession is the emergence of Fintechs that have arisen from a lack of innovation within the U.S. banking system. Fintechs have stepped in to do things that banks would have traditionally done 25 years ago. Bank management has been forced to concentrate on making the regulators happy for the past 10 years.

What happens if the regulatory burden is eased on the banking community? In theory capital would be available to enable innovation. The question then is whether today's bank management has the capacity to act more like a Fintech Vs a bank. At some point Fintechs could look more like banks, and banks look like Fintechs. It will be interesting watching this convergence in the next 10 years.

I do not get these high evaluations. It reminds me of the Internet bubble. Stripe is neat and does provide some value. But, as an innovator it too can be very easily dusrupted since it is a very part small part of the payments value chain. In terms of the value chain it provides less than 5% of the entire merchant acceptance chain's value. With this type of valuation it is approaching the First Data, Vantiv, and Global Payments. Stripe is nowhere near what any of these companies do in terms of actual client value.

This valuation reminds me of like Las Yegas -- lots of glitter, dreams, hype but not a lot actual value. I see this type of stilly valuation as an indiction that there are a lot of people who are clueless.

What works well is someone who understands the business of banking first coupled with an appreciation of technology. Technology centric solutions never work. The trick is to be creative but always be aligned with your clients, and to not over or under spend. New markets always take longer to develop than you expect. Always remember the Gartner Hype Curve.  It is great that Wells is taking a client not a product approach to all this. This seems like a simple move but for a bank like Wells it is big since big large banks do not play well internally.

Many of the Fintech lending start-ups are positioning themselves to eventually be brought out by more established lenders. I am not surprised by Goldman's move. Scale, size and capital always trumps an idea with no capital.