Photo Doug Chayka Banking has long been viewed as one of the last traditional, old-school, stuck-in-the-past industries. When you think of banking, you might still think of wood-paneled walls and pinstripe suits.
That impression may increasingly be misguided.
If you spend more than 15 minutes with any senior executive of a large bank these days, it is almost impossible not to hear the phrase “fintech” uttered. It is usually spoken with a sense of optimism, but sometimes with a sense of dread.
“Fintech,” of course, is short for financial technology, a catchall for a near-revolution of new technologies aimed at upending parts of the financial world, including payments, wealth management, lending, insurance and currency.
The fintech phrase itself is actually not new — it dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s — though it has taken on a heightened sense of importance and urgency now that it has been embraced by Silicon Valley as the new new thing. An estimated $19 billion of investment poured into the fintech bucket last year, according to Citigroup, up from just $1.8 billion five years earlier.
“The real threat to banks is not from Washington or Brussels but from start-ups all over the country creating interesting fintech start-ups that are chipping away at key parts of their franchise,” said Steve Case, a founder of AOL and an entrepreneur with investments in several fintech businesses, who just wrote a book about the future, “The Third Wave.”
The promise of all these new technologies is to fundamentally disrupt the biggest players in finance. Companies like Stripe, a payments company, hope to become replacements for PayPal and others. Lending Club wants to make getting a loan cheaper and easier. Wealthfront wants to advise you and manage your money from your phone. And, of course, Bitcoin and its many derivatives wants to […]