Banks have always been top of the food chain. The threat of FinTechs (Challenger Banks are included in that term here) have done little to change that fact in terms of numbers of customers and sheer size. When the phenomenon of FinTechs hit the banking scene it was very much as competitors.
I have been catching up on some light reading in the glorious English sunshine. One report in particular caught my eye; the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released a paper in July
In my last blog, looking at the rise of the challengers to the traditional banking industry, I stated “these ‘lightweight’ contestants in the banking market have harnessed new technologies and processes to deliver a better customer experience.” The blog elicited a comment from Kevin Gillespie when posted on LinkedIn – “You missed the entrance of mobile phone companies in payments ... mPesa in Kenya is 45% owned by Vodafone and operates payments in Romania on the same platform ... the new competitors may not even bother to get in the ring and still win the fight as they invent new ways of exchanging value”.
Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) the banking industry, especially in the UK, has experienced significant growth with the advent of the “Digital Challenger”. These ‘lightweight’ contestants in the banking market have harnessed new technologies and processes to deliver a better customer experience.
The 2018 Payment Services Directive (PSD2) opens up payments markets to new, radical service providers in an aim to create a cheaper, more efficient European payments market. It provides new opportunities for third parties to access banks’ internal data in real-time to improve customer service.
How can technology support the principle of ‘fair and effective markets’?
In my last blog on cross border payments I was mulling the concept of “fair and effective” markets and musing how that would apply to the current landscape of high bank charges in this area. The original blog was inspired by a newspaper article that was expressing outrage that a bank was discriminating against smaller corporates (SME’s) on a systematic basis.
