The Economist: The Fintech Revolution

This week’s special report in The Economist on Financial Technology (or Fintech) talks about the new wave of ideas changing traditional finance, from payments to wealth management, crowd funding and digital currencies. Fintech start-ups continue to attract record investment year-on-year from the venture capital community, and many are long past the experimental phase. The report also discusses the uncertain and evolving relationship between fintech and traditional banks.

As we have pointed out in some of our previous posts, despite the fact that many of the most relevant trends in this space are still nascent or emerging, there is huge potential for them to impact the asset management industry and subsequently our world of investor relations.

For those fairly new to the subject, you may find our basic Fintech Dictionary useful in explaining some basic concepts and definitions.

A few points from the Economist report in particular caught our attention:

• Although the amount of assets managed by automated wealth managers (so-called ‘robo-advisors’) doubles every few months or so, the global total is still only around $20bn, compared to roughly $17tr for traditional managers. The argument in favour of robo-advisors, which mainly utilise indexing strategies while staying clear of mutual funds and individual stocks, is that they can use algorithms to provide sound investment advice for a fraction of the price of a real life advisor. The majority of the take-up so far has been from clients under 35 with an average account size of less than $100,000. It is interesting to note that Schoders, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard, Schwab and JP Morgan Chase have all either made direct investments in robo-advisory platforms or are planning to launch their own.
• The electronic ledger ‘Blockchain’ is the technology behind the digital currency Bitcoin. Blockchain offers a decentralised, public account of all Bitcoin transactions. Enthusiasts believe its application in the financial markets may be much broader; in theory the technology could be applied across a wide range of applications, such as the issuance and trading of securities. Unsurprisingly, a number of large financial institutions, as well as exchanges, have taken steps to explore this further.
• Providing financial services to millions of customers, especially to those in populous emerging markets in Asia and Africa who previously had no access to them, is another area that fintech looks to address. While only 25% of people in Africa have access to a bank account, over 80% have a mobile telephone. Taking advantage of this gap is M-pesa, a Kenyan phone based payments scheme now used by three quarters of adults in the country. As these concepts evolve it is fascinating to think about the possibilities and applications for providing credit, retirement and investment solutions to millions almost overnight.

We will continue look at some of these ideas in more depth over the summer.