What does a FinTech platform need to succeed?
If you’re not sure what a FinTech platform is, that’s okay, I wasn’t either. FinTech is short for Financial Technology, an emerging industry that aspires to improve upon traditional banking systems and provide financial services to the underserved. A platform is a software tool interacting with multiple applications designed to provide solutions for all the users in an industry or vertical. (Technically, Facebook is a platform, designed for consumers, providing colorful communication capabilities across the globe, and access to those consumers for brands [and governments].)
So, what does a platform for emerging markets need to do?
Well, can you think of ways you’d like your bank to be better? I know I can.
A FinTech platform can’t spoof your account into multiples and charge you fees without your knowledge or permission as Fells Wargo did. (Crooks.)
Why not?
KYC Protocols
Know your customer protocols are becoming de rigueur since Etherium introduced smart-contracts which can be applied across any vertical, not strictly financial arrangements.
To win, a FinTech platform would need to address the existing pain-points of traditional banking AND have a vision of economic inclusion to maximize the opportunity into the future.
To start, it would need to accommodate the entire landscape of trading:
- Stocks,
- Derivatives,
- Indexes,
- Commodities, and
- Cryptocurrencies
See how this is shaping up? You’ve got capacity to support each corner of speculation in financial markets. Which means you’ll need a powerhouse of a matching (transaction-processing) engine; on the order of 1M transactions per second. Yeah, among the fastest-in-the-world type of engine.
Anything planning to serve the world needs written, telephonic, and/or chat customer-support available in most languages. So far, existing platforms are struggling to provide this at scale.
Your code also needs to be decipherable across devices. In this competitive world, there are at least five major mobile manufacturers hosting their operating system, all of which need to be coded for, plus you need to be interoperable between all devices including desktop and laptop.
You’d need a hungry market.
A place where traditional banking hasn’t even approached saturation. A place where the standard of living isn’t quite modern, like say, the developing world, where billions of people have access to a smartphone but no access to a bank account.
Imagine how many lives you could positively impact by making purchasing power available across borders or boundaries. Chokes me up a little.
Behind all this, you need galactic-strength security. Most existing platforms are built quickly and inexpensively inevitably running into challenges that should have been addressed at the design phase, leaving customers and their holdings vulnerable to more than volatility in the market. Trading volumes of this magnitude must be protected exceptionally well.
Existing platforms already have difficulty with slippage, which is the lag-time between computers signaling and humans executing on entrance and exit in a trade. A strong platform needs to accommodate for that.
And above all, your platform needs to have a world-class UI (user interface). Be honest, how many apps have you stopped using because they were cool-at-first-but-got-clunky-and-cumbersome, or were replaced by a similar app with a much better interface?
Usability is everything, followed closely by security, in the future of smart-anything. I know I want my experience of embarking on risk vs. reward to be rewarding in and of itself. I want it to feel like the future. I want to know its secure. I want solid support. As long as I have those things, I will trust it and will use it to speculate, send money, and make purchases.
I recently discovered the OuroX team at Crypto Invest Summit and found it exceeded most platform design dynamics in most of the ways I was seeking. I joined their Telegram channel to chat with their leadership team. They just launched a page on StartEngine which dives into their roll-out. Impressed by the technology, I did some research on the team which I’ll share next week.
Hit me in the comments or DMs and tell me what exchanges or features I missed. If you can write your entire message in emojis you get extra credit.
