The study «Finantial Ecosystems and Platforms»  conducted by  Evoca Media and sponsored by ORACLE was presented yesterday at Madrid.  It analyzes and classifies Fintechs and provides some analytics on how the Spanish Financial Institutions perceive Fintech impact in the short and medium term.

Fintech Disruption is one of the big themes for financial industry professionals, experts and analysts.  The so-called Fintechs include new digital banks born to operate digital-only as well as a myriad of digital start-ups offering services such as P2P lending; mobile transactions solutions; payment systems based in virtual currencies; money transfer services among family and friends; P2P consumer credits; equity crowd-funding; equity trading; personal risk scoring, finantial market data analyisis etc…

With Fintechs, millennials are discovering a new “Bank without Banks” experience which has triggered all the alarms. Millennials do not care to use not-branded digital banks or to have a transactional only interaction. As Accenture has pointed out, millenials are looking for “Everyday Banks” to help them with all their financial and non-financial needs.

The study analyzes 10 of the most representatives financial digital unicorns as:

Lending Club one of the best known examples of successful Fintechs. The biggest online credit marketplace is a platform-based business that puts in contact people or small industries with investors for P2P credits. The key to success of their business model is offering lower interest rates than traditional banks, it has Google among its investors and is worth 9.000 M$ today.

LoopPay, company created in 2012, is offering mobile wallets and having the higher acceptance in the USA. The startup has announced smart-watches wallets to come soon.

BitPay created in 2011 at the beginning of the bitcoin system offers today services to more than 60.000 companies across the Globe.The blockchain mechanism behind Bitcoin ledger gains trust by building a distributed encrypted shared database of nodes. Some Banks as Santander Bank pointed out that this may allow savings of billions in operational banking costs and several institutions have announced the creation of shared and private blockchains.

The list of examples is long and it includes additional startups as WorldRemit for Money Transfers; Powa Technologies or Seedrs for Equiti Crowfunding among many others.

Conclusion:

IMD Business School has recently pointed the financial sector as the second one having a higher risk to suffer a disruptive dynamic as the consequence of the entrance of Fintechs into the market.

The World Retail Banking Report 2015 (Capgemini/Efma) highlights that the level of Customer Experience delivered by Banks is stagnating due to most valuable agile and innovative propositions offered by non-bank actors that make it difficult for banks to keep up with the increase in personal expectations, participation and customer experience.

Making the situation still more challenging for traditional banks, not only Fintechs but Industries such as Telcos are also entering the Finantial market especially in the transactional world.

A David against Golliat battle is happening and most visionary banks are studying new ways to operate including:

• Applying Fintech technologies i.e the Blockchain model under Bitcoin for distributed ledger
• New ways to capitalize on their data through market alliances with other Industries
• Offering financial services as a service such as risk management to other companies and industries including Fintechs.

This evolution towards a most “liquid provision of financial services” and platform-based models of collaboration requires an important change on existing banking technology building Cloud-Based Digital Platforms in order to benefit from successful Fintech technologies; establishing new models around data; and providing Banking as a Service

I believe that in the digital era financial institutions that will survive and manage to keep their growth are the ones that understand that the times when banks dominated the interaction with the customer are over.

They are reinventing their business taking the opportunities of the digital era to interact with a much broader partner ecosystem in different ways.

They are working to establish new collaborations with Fintechs startups and other industry sectors such as Telcos, Insurance, Travel or Retail, keeping an eye open on emerging Industry-Platforms that require underlying financial services to operate and investing to build cloud-based digital platforms allowing them to expose their services and data in an agile and scalable way through secure APIs to their most valuable assets.

Only in that way banks of the future will provide Financial services as a Service and disrupt the disruptors.

INFOGRAPHIC FINTECH-SPAIN