Fintech: Dinosaurs are doomed

I’m sick and tired of reading articles describing how the banks are going to buy the new players in Fintech.

Yes. It is going to happen. It has already happened. BBVA has already bought Simple and Atom. And it took them two years to start integrating Simple in a meaningful way.

However acquisitions are not going to change anything. And it is not because people in those banks don’t have a clue. There are brilliant people over there.

But these are big dinosaurs. They move slowly. They could move faster. But that is not the problem.

The problem is changing their direction. They have a lot of inertia.

When you have the whole IT department thinking in terms of batch processes, NO AMOUNT of effort will make them able to process in real time. You would need to kill the IT department and start from scratch. But it is not only IT. It’s marketing. It’s customer service.

At one point I thought it was the way to go. Now I think that banking is going to be like media. Most of them are doomed. Sure, they will be some that will do the “transition to digital”.

But not many.

And we are not yet talking about Bitcoin or Facebook/Amazon/Google.