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As neobanks learned to their dismay, it's an exercise in futility to expect first time bank customers to forsake a bank branch for a mobile app. While the article makes no mention of the profile of the surveyed audience, I'm reasonably sure it's people who don't do much investing now, whether by themselves or via human financial advisor. Just as in the case of neobanks, it's highly unlikely that first time investors will accept a robo-advisor.

That said, after having a human stock broker handle my stock trading for 15 years, I moved online at the earliest available opportunity, which was in circa 2000. While the eTrading platform has its own niggling issues, it ticks the big boxes far better than any human broker could / can do. Warts and all, I'll never go back to a human advisor. That tells me that, if the same survey were held among people who are already doing some investing, the results would be quite different. That's what I think Martin Krebs is hinting at in his statement about people having "some familiarity with investing".

@ChandrashekarRaoKuthyar:

Apologies for delay in responding to your comment.

TY for your kind words.

Yes I agree. In fact my point #5 resonates with your comment about capacitor.

PS: I Googled for <CS> tag, couldn't find anything on page 1 of SERP, didn't bother to go beyond that. I hope it's not a variant of </sarc> tag or something like that:)

@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.