Banking: big changes loom
Two news items today that reveal different sides to events in the banking industry: on the one hand, Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s biggest investment bankers, has launched GS Bank, an online retail bank created out of the recent acquisition of GE Online Bank that doesn’t seem to be targeting its traditional super-rich clientele. The bank is covered by the FDIC, and offers a generous 1.05 percent compared to most US banks’ measly 0.06 percent.
At the same time, in the biggest financing round in the tech sector ever, Ant Financial, the Alibaba spin-off that operates Alipay, the country’s biggest payment platform, has raised some $4.5 billion, meaning the company is now valued at $60 billion. Alipay dominates the Chinese market, and can be used not just for online payments, but also by smartphone. China is now far and away the world’s biggest digital payment market.
As we can see, not all innovation in the banking sector comes from fintech, startups, Silicon Valley, the City, or likewise. In large part, innovation will come through entities that know how to work differently, through acquisitions or spinoffs that allow them to create new teams, new attitudes or use new organizational skills, supposing that they aren’t, as everything would indicate, able to innovate from within their own environment.
But innovation is emerging everywhere: from upscale divisions looking to broaden their customer base, to pay apps hived off from large corporations, and on to “exotic” possibilities such as machine learning or new interactive platforms… from everywhere. If you are in banking and you still don’t know about this stuff, then buckle up, you’re in for a bumpy ride!
(En español, aquí)
