If Digital Banks are so great why is no one using them?

On July 10th 2015 Amazon became the world’s biggest retailer, overtaking Walmart. It took 21 years for a dotcom bookseller to overturn the entire retail industry, globally. It’s not just Amazon, Wish.com, a relative newcomer compared to Amazon (launched 2010) is worth almost as much as Macy’s, J.C.Penney and Sears combined. Amazon and Wish.com give a compelling example of tech driven disruption at an industry level at scale.

Over the same period, if you had attended any financial services (FS) conference or seen or read any coverage on it you might be under the impression that the same is happening there. The decline and fall of the traditional banking and FS sector and their disruption and replacement with consumers flocking en mass to new entrant digital players.

However, that has not happened — the financial services sector seems remarkably intact and untouched, if we measure change by where customers are choosing to put their money. The present narrative that banks are being broken by Fintech is just not accurate, and alternative narratives need to be created for the industry and their customers to really benefit from the opportunities tech is bringing to market.

Banking innovation in the modern era