Assignment - The Old and The New in Fintech

[kirsten]

In Canada we are a bit behind it seems and only in the last couple of years are we starting to really get new developments happening. In February 2018, the Government of Canada introduced amendments to the Bank Act to allow trust companies, credit unions and co-operatives to use words like “bank” and “banking” to promote their own products and services. The amendments also expanded the scope of technology-related activities banks can participate in so they are not as restricted simply by virtue of being banks. These changes provide greater flexibility for such firms to enter into new arrangements with third parties, such as FinTech firms. There is still a lot of opportunity in Canada.

[leewizza]

Some already great work by my fellow Australians, above (Roger777 and Yeleva to name a couple).
I’d like to expand on the property and lending space, as that’s the industry I am most familiar with. Lendi was mentioned by Yeleva. Lendi is essentially just a mortgage brokerage (part-owned by a bank!) that uses tech to streamline their processes but that’s about it.
I think the true opportunity in this space is to either a) eliminate banks via peer-to-peer lending b) make the property/car purchase somewhat instant by removing the onerous steps along the journey.
For example, the average home loan application is currently taking 15-20 business days for approval… mainly due to multiple parties being involved and bank staff not speaking to each other.
The day we don’t need a bank to buy a house, we won’t use them. Period.

So, I can see a world where we rebundle peer-to-peer lending dapps, property conveyancing and insurance all within the same interface.
That will shrink the times taken for settlement on a property purchase.
The quicker the property can settle, the more likely the real estate agents will start pushing it… marketing done for you.

Alas, I need to spend some more time on this, hence the reason I have actually sold my large mortgage brokering business to focus full-time on this.
Daunting BUT exciting at the same time.

Here we go!! haha

[Ferre]

In Namibia, there is PayPulse. There is a limit in that yoi can only use it locally and cant be used to to receive or send funds abroad. Even the old Paypal still has limitations in Namibia in that we can only send funds but cannot receive so there is defenetely a gap for these type of fintech services.

[makinitnow]

In my region, I mostly found data for Mobile banks that offer debit cards, enable to pay or send money, some insurance, less investment, borrow, save money products.

Also according to a Master thesis from one of our universities named Fintech as an alternative for financing SME in Slovenija, the empirical analysis shows that slovenian companies know about alternative financing possibilities, enabled through Fintech, but in practice remain behind other countries.
When thinking about how to fill the gap of B2B financing I like what Centrifuge is doing.

I also found info on an analysis on Slovenian digital banking including all online Slovenian banks & N26, but they are accepting pre-orders for 2000 eur & is yet not publicly available.
(http://www.e-laborat.si/analiza-digitalnega-bancnistva-v-sloveniji-2-2/)
Other data show best mobile bank is mBankaNet.

[Nordkapp]

My country is Hungary. I found that fo the most part the fin tech companies are involved in payment. Domestic and foreign fintech companies have almost equal shares on the Hungarian market. These are most important in Hungary : . There are a lot of new different startups in the field but it’s too early to talk about everyday usage of fintech for insurance, investment, landing etc.

[Mathew]

Wealthsimple - Focusing on investments for retail traders. Basically taking consumers from the retail bank space and investment banking space.

Interac - Focusing on payments, identity security and data acquisition. Focusing on payments.

Shopify - Payments for goods.

KOHO - Payments and Savings.

Borrowell - Credit scoring. Focusing on Borrowing.

Clearbanc - Borrowing and Lending for businesses.

Mastercard - Payments, Lending, Borrowing, Insurance.

Square - Payments

Paypal - Payments

LTI Canada - Investments

Oberthur Technologies - Payments

Verified.me - Digital Identities

VISA - Payments, Borrowing, Lending

Some areas that are lacking are in the Saving and Insurance areas

[Fjell]

The existing fintechs in the United Kingdom are growing all the time and serving a great variety of sectors of the banking industry. See the latest 56 page government report regarding this - “UK FinTech - State of the Nation - Gov.uk” at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/801277/UK-fintech-state-of-the-nation.pdf

[Verses]

Region The Philippines

this is the most up-to-date map I could find. without doing much research I already know that the fintech that was implemented first was Lending, Wallets, and Remittance. The Philippines is known for doing a lot of Lending and Remittance and over the years there’s been a big increase in Digital Wallets like Grab Pay, G-Cash, Paymaya. We also are starting to introduce a lot of Challenger Banks that indeed are so much faster and better than Old Banks that everyone uses. i recently change to a Challenger bank since I found that the old banks don’t help you fast enough and sometimes their services can be quite bad. An example of a good Challenger Bank right now in the Philippines is ING (altho a bank that was derived from the Netherlands) this bank is fully digital and offers 0% on transaction fees and withdrawal fees when using a different bank’s atm. it also has a way higher interest on saving accounts.

everything outside of Remittance, Wallets and Lending is definitely a sweet spot that is underserved and could be a nice opportunity to innovate

[JamesM]

Here is a screen shot of the FINTECH ecosystem in Spain, where there is a massive selection of Fintech players right now.
The areas that are underserved and therefore offer better opportunities right now are Insurance, Trade and Equity finance or payments and NEO / Challenger banks.

[William_Kuang]

Japan

top left yellow box is for payments.
personal investment below it, then cryptocurrency companies below.

2nd box from the left on the top is for loans.
red box below is for insurance.
the box below it, is for “social lending”. seems like that is quite saturated.

3rd green box from the left on the top is for accounting/fund management.
blue box below is for securities. only 4 here so perhaps there is opportunities there.

on the far right column, you have personal fund management, then information on banking.
This section only have 2 companies and is not saturated yet. this is a good location to start.

bottom right box is crowdfunding (irrelevant?)

Seems like Japan is lacking in the database/information tech side of things though there is always google…not sure why that isnt there.

[Ivan_Z]

Actually, out of aprox. 300 spanish Fintech companies, 48% are complementary to the traditional banks, 32% cooperative and just 20% are competitors. The reason is that in the beginning the target were the customers that were not or not properly served by the traditional banks.

A large amount of startups try to improve a specific area of the banking system and hope to sell their tech “biscuits” to the traditional banks. Due to an uncertain regulatory situation they fear an open and frontal competition with traditional banks. Let´s hope for the first brave start-up, and let’s hope it’s an outsider !

[FreeBird81]

• Kyriba - Active Liquidity Network which functions as a SaaS platform
• GAIN credit - Access credit and lending services
• National Funding - Primarily support small to medium sized businesses
• ClosingCorp - Serving clients in the real estate industry with mortgage and property closing
• Engage Financial Technology - Bringing banking clients to the forefront of digital banking
• DiversyFund - Helping investors by providing knowledge resources and technology tools to build investments.
• WYLog - Technology development provider for companies in fintech industry and beyond

The challenge of keeping up with the worlds finances is being taken on by the pioneers in the fintech industry. From mobile banking apps to cryptocurrency solutions.

[spaceballs]

Make a screening of existing fintechs in your region using google and map out which kind of banks they are focusing on.

• bitpanda (challenger/neobank)
• blockpit (tax-reports, specialized bank)
• wikifolio (social trading platform)
• cashpresso (lending)
• conda, dagobertinvest (crowdinvesting)
• finabro (investmentbank)
• transpaygo (spezialized on international money transfer)

https://df.media/these-are-the-top-fintech-financial-technology-companies-in-austria-2021/

Estimate the areas that are currently underserved in your region (in other words, where the opportunities are)

• most fintechs in Austria are in investment sector, in my opinion best opportunities in insurance sector

[CryptoUnicorns]

A map is starting to list the Fintech companies around the globe:
https://findexable.com/

Currently on this map listed in Spain:
Lending and Marketplace: 5
Virtual and cryptocurrencies: 6
Payment and Transfert: 1
Investing and Trading - retail and institutional: 1
Banking technologies, infrastructure, and automation: 11
PFM and Wealth management: 2
Banking: 0
Services for SMEs: 1
Insurance: 4
Analytics, and scoring: 0
Blockchain: 1
Authentification, cyber, and fraud: 0
Subindustry.108: 0
Regtech - management of regulatory processes within the financial industry -, and compliance: 0
Subindustry.107: 0
Other Fintech - digital banking, wallet apps with banking functions, flash loans, credits, businesses and freelancers funding, car renting, and more: 123

Referring to this map and the course content - 6 pillars of banking services - many startups are offering payment, lending, borrowing, investing services. The opportunities only a few for now offer are saving, and insuring.

[Aleksander]

Here is map of FinTech in Poland:

http://fintechpoland.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/mapa-fintechu.jpg

According to 2017 PWC report:
20% of banks in Poland buy fintech services
35% don’t kmow what blockchain is
Although fintech sector is growing rapidly as it is subvencionised and legally supported by goverments (actually no matter what party is in charge)

It is focused on reteil, mostly payments and lending money,which works great and actually everywere (U can pay for veggies in a small village shop with Blik (a code solution working as app together with all banks in Pl).

Fintech is also serving SME with Factoring services, loans, leasings etc.

https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/fintech-2017-raport-pwc.pdf

Unfortunatly it is focused on fast and easie solutions and they skip longterm developments involving AI. But it’s 2017 and what I saw in latest news somewhere they are also work with AI in fintech in security and against frauds.

[tony1999]

1. There aren’t much fintechs in my region
2. I think that Insuring and Investing are too very unsaturated fintech areas in my region.

[cryptcat]

I can’t find any cool infographics for the US, but here is what I’ve got:

Top existing fintechs in the USA 2021 (out of 10,605, as of 2/2021):

Stripe: $95 billion; SME/global corporations- processes online payments for small business and big tech

Klarna: $31 billion; retail- processes small payment amounts of each purchase

Kraken: $20 billion; will be rolling out banking plans in WY soon

Chime: $14.5 billion; retail- digital only checking/debit accounts

Plaid: $13.4 billion; retail- connects financial accounts to one app

Robinhood: $11.7 billion; retail- investment app

Brex: $7.4 billion; SME/mid-corp/global corp- creates financial services for companies and corporations

Carta: $6.8 billion; SME-financial services for small business

I would say the clear opportunistic area would be fintech for institutions. I have an idea for this

[maddie]

There are tons of fintech companies in Sweden and especially in Stockholm where I live. According to this image from the 2020 fintech guide by Invest Stockholm, the DeFi area seems to be the smallest one. I’m familiar with most of the companies there and I see a lot of room for improvement there. Especially for offramps when it comes to crypto. The existing companies only support a very small number of crypto currencies. And the traditional banks want nothing to do with crypto because they are worried about money laundering regulations.

[thenode369]

UK, North of England

• Make a screening of existing fintechs in your region using google and map out which kind of banks they are focusing on.

Bankifi - Consolidation of legacy banking services
Mojo Capital - Mortgages
Mojo - Mortgages
Finstart - Venture Capital
Uinsure - Insurance Services
Rapidpay - Consolidation of legacy banking services & payments
Fibonatix - Business POS and banking services

• Estimate the areas that are currently underserved in your region (in other words, where the opportunities are)

Investment and Savings

[Nanxo]

In 2021, we are seeing an uprise within the Fintech Infrastructure. Its revolutionizing how we bank, how we insure, manage our assets and how we transact our payments. Based on the influx of institutions we are in the peak of a transition to see upgraded platforms with embedded financial services all in one.