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@AnonFinextraMember: 

Apologies for missing out acknowledging and replying to your comment earlier. 

Yes, as I'd hinted at the end of my post, it's not in the interest of traditional product vendors to help customers to assemble software systems from prebuilt components. The operating model required for that may be more appealing to services vendors.

That said, I recently stumbled on to a couple of product vendors who highlight reusability e.g. Avoka:  

"The Avoka Transact™ design tool provides pre-built components for rapid form creation as well as the ability to customize the experience."

As long as fintech chanted the "bank disruption" mantra, it enjoyed huge valuations and had no shortage of VC funding. Maybe it's only me but I see a strong correlation between the change of fintech's tune to "bank partnership" and drying up of VC funding for the sector. To answer the question in the title of this article, in reality, there was / is no fintech revolution. But there was a perception of fintech revolution in the past. That perception has gone away now, which has triggered the VC funding crisis for fintech.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with fintech's current positioning as bank's tech partners - many traditional finserv technology suppliers have been flourishing in that capacity for ages.

Apart from fintech's ability to do something that customers really want, it struck me that the sector's outlook depends on the answers to a couple of questions such as: (1) Does fintech have the organizational DNA to become just another technology supplier? (2) More importantly, can it survive in that role without VC funding? Either way, this reinforces my old blog post Banks Have Nothing To Fear From Neobanks.

While they're thinking about talent and Singapore and Brexit and all that, fintechs should think about creating products that customers really need instead of offering yet another bank account that customers can get from high street banks anyway.

One such product for which there's a crying need is credit cards. To take India's example, there are merely 20M credit cards for a population of 1.2B people. I've heard of fewer than 5 fintech credit card offerings (none of them in India) and, when I probed them a little deeply, they seemed to be closer to debit / charge cards than credit cards. If fintechs focused on fulfilling customers' compelling needs, they'd see their adoption grow automatically.

While the idea of an aggregator app has always sounded great on paper, they face the following unresolved questions in actual practice: (1) Who will own such an app? (2) What's their business case for developing and marketing such an app? I hope you're not suggesting that customers will be willing to pay for such an app (3) Who will take responsibility for any data breach? (4) For precisely the reason you've pointed out - loss of customer relationship - member banks and FIs will actively stonewall such an app (as they've reportedly done UPI and BharatQR).

PFM / MoMMA apps in USA already do much of what your Aggregator Banking App is spec'ced to do. A couple of apps have tried to aggregate Uber / Ola / Meru and other cab apps in India. The closest we've come to a cross-FI app in India is BHIM. Despite the drive for #CashlessIndia and all the fanfare surrounding its launch and the subsequent publicity for it, its adoption has already hit a plateau with around 30M users.

Maybe because of the aforementioned challenges or otherwise, I can't think of a single aggregator app that has managed to go mainstream. But I'm happy to be corrected.

Okay, thanks, so what does "data should be ingested according to a plan that leads with governance" mean then? For the moment, I'm still on Data Lake, so Data Reservoir - a term I'm hearing for the first time - best practices is a different thing.

LOL. They say switching banks is more painful than undergoing a root canal surgery. Wonder if Robot Root Canal Surgeons would make bank switching less of a pain?:)

In principle these problems are not unique to data lakes. In one form or the other, they've plagued data mart, data warehouse and virtually every analytics initiative since the dawn of data. To me, it's important to deep dive into the root causes of these problems. I found this HBR article useful in that context. If companies decide upfront the degree of Data Offence v. Data Defence they want to strike for a given data management initiative, these initiatives will automatically enjoy a higher success rate.

On a side note, I respectfully disagree with Fix #3. By definition, data lake is a "storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format". IMO, subjecting data to prior governance runs counter to the way in which a data lake should be built.

Why has it taken so long for fintechs to do what conventional IT companies have been doing for ages? This should also be a huge wake up call for VCs and other investors in fintech. They should be asking fintechs why they're making huge losses doing exactly what conventional IT companies have been doing profitably for years viz. supplying financial technology to banks.

@MelvinHaskins:

Simplicity is said to be the hallmark of iPhone, so the mega success of iPhone may not negate your view that people don't need a sophisticated phone!

OTOH, if people only buy what they need rather than what they want, so many industries / companies would perish and GDP of the world would crash. So, even assuming for the moment that people will aspire for - though not need - sophisticated products including banks, the bigger question is, what will they get from fintechs. Take a product like credit card. More than 5 years since the start of fintech hype, how many fintechs offer credit cards? For all the hype surrounding online P2P lending, most P2P loans are issued by traditional banks. There are nonbank mortgage providers like Quicken but, despite the fact that they've been around for ages, they haven't disrupted the banking industry.

A few years ago, finsurgents were talking about breaking banks. That didn't work. Then they pivoted their model and started talking about providing technology, without which they claimed banks will collapse. That too didn't work. Then they changed their tune to partnering with banks. The jury's out on whether that will work.

I haven't used ATMs in Switzerland for a while but, when I last used them, different banks supported different feature sets on their ATM estate. I remember that only UBS ATMs supported cross-border remittance. I wonder how a unified interface for ATMs of all banks will support differentiation by different bank's ATMs. The issue is many more times relevant in India where ATMs have been supporting a very wide of functionality including bill payments, temple donations, train and event ticketing, and so on, for 15+ years. While security is important, I hope they don't throw the baby out with the bathwater by sacrificing bank-specific differentiaton for the sake of security. The last time they did it for online payments by mandating 2FA, it led to so much friction and caused so many failed payments that many people - including me - who were using credit cards for online shopping earlier switched to Cash on Delivery.