The end of fintech as we know it

The media coverage of the exchange between Orrin Hatch, the US Senator from Utah, and Mark Zuckerberg has been stripped of all context. The head of Facebook was asked how he is going to sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for the service. Zuckerberg paused for a while and answered with a hint of a smile that they run ads.

In reality it wasn’t an ignorant question about how Facebook makes money. The senator pointed out before that there is no free lunch. He was more aware than millions of Facebook users what the social media giant’s business model is built on. He knew that Facebook users are blind to what Facebook is doing with their data and it is far more than running ads.

But in the media it was widely presented as an another example where people on high positions are detached from reality. Just another example of superstition. The knowledge we need to have about the new economy is neither rocket science nor a black belt in martial arts.

Oh yeah, there are some professions that are not easy to explain to your grandparents what you do for a living. New technologies and the financial services are the areas where the density of buzzwords is higher than elsewhere. Let’s try to explain to John Doe, not necessarily a geek, that what you do is investing in graphic cards to mine cryptocurrency faster.

On the other hand less than two weeks ago, after decades of usage, the word fintech has made its way into the Merriam-Webster dictionary. So it enters the general vocabulary. It’s not a buzzword anymore.

Fintech means products and companies that employ newly developed digital and online technologies in the banking and financial services industries.

In the same group of words just added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary you can find TL;DR. The internet slang word I do not want to be associated with what I wrote. So I’ll finish now.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on September 17, 2018.