On the 11th of March the world celebrates World Plumbing Day. For most of us, this probably doesn’t mean much. Mainly because in the western world we take great plumbing for granted. Working sanitation seems like such a non-event, that the idea of celebrating it seems redundant. But of courseRead More
Bank Innovation
Much has been written about the #future of #banking. In the end, it all seems to come down to one question: will #banks become platforms or #pipes?
In reality, there’s no question at all. Platforms are the winning business model of the 21st century and the banking industry is well aware. In fact, banks have been platforms for decades — #fintech is merely creating the latest set of bank #platform extensions. Earlier incarnations include ATMs and online bill pay for consumers.
That said, what’s happening today is forcing banks to rethink how fast they extend their platform to avoid becoming just the pipes. The advent of the cloud and the software revolution in Fintech with billions of capital being invested every quarter has brought more innovation to banking in the past two years than it has seen in the past twenty. Still, the current David taking down Goliath narrative surrounding the future of banking and finance ultimately fails to account for the reality of the situation.
While it often goes unnoticed, a great many fintech startups today rely heavily on banks to enable their innovative services. The success of financial innovations like Apple Pay for instance is happening with a great deal of participation and cooperation between #technology companies and financial institutions.
This relationship between banks and fintech underscores the reality of the financial services industry’s future. Yes, finance is evolving alongside the accelerating curve of technology, and yes, fintech is driving much of this change, but banks are – and will remain – squarely at the center of the financial universe for quite some time to come.
For one, banks have been the backbone of the modern economy since its inception. They are far too ingrained in the financial system to be removed within any foreseeable time frame.
Banks also have deep pockets, infrastructure and experience. Large market caps and long track records are clear signals to customers that banks can weather the inevitable downturn. Startups, on the other hand, are more susceptible to turbulence and market volatility — things banking customers, especially business customers, would rather avoid.
Big data is yet another boon to banks’ staying power. Banks have been collecting data on customer transactions and behavior for decades. This creates major advantages for banks. When used in the right way, this data can be leveraged to do things like identify customers that are ripe for new payment services or to mitigate and underwrite risk in innovative ways.
But despite all this, there is one hazard currently menacing banks: disintermediation. Starting with the ATM, technology has been distancing consumers from banks for quite some time. Today, their relationship with the consumer is slimmer than ever.
Meanwhile, fintech is picking up the slack. While traditional banking experiences can feel clunky, fintech products and services are designed to work with people’s lives and deliver value in new and unexpected ways. These upstarts pride themselves on delivering superior customer experiences — banking that is intuitive, mobile, cloud-based, responsive, available 24/7, you name it.
Fintech companies are also agile and built for rapid iteration — skill sets banks don’t yet have internally. This allows fintech companies to focus heavily on usability and keeping their user interfaces modern. At Bill.com, for instance, we iterate our onboarding experience every two weeks. By comparison, most banks have outsourced many key functions to third-party service providers like Fiserv and Jack Henry, severely limiting their ability to make product changes outside of rigid, long-term release cycles.
The comparative lack of innovation by banks is no surprise. For decades, banks have spent most of their resources driving to meet quarterly earnings targets, delivering consistent results and ensuring compliance — the key objectives most highly-regulated, publicly-traded financial institutions must focus on to meet its obligations to shareholders — leaving fewer resources and funds for experimentation, learning and new product development. This makes it difficult for banks to keep up with shifts in customer preferences and behavior the way that fintech can. Banks know this and it is exactly why they are starting to shift their strategies to reflect being a platform and not just the pipes.
When banks become platforms for their customers and fintech partners, they increase the value of what they have built over the past several decades and disintermediation on the consumer front becomes irrelevant. Instead, as banks fuse their platforms with fintech, innovation will accelerate creating tremendous value for everyone in the food chain.
[linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/renelacerte” connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”René Lacerte”] is CEO/Founder Bill.com and this article was originally published on linkedin.
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