Fintech: here is our amazing solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had!
Banker: oh you mean like <some common piece of banking terminology>
Fintech: blank stares
A fintech that is all ex-bank who spun off to solve a problem they knew they had, will probably succeed. A fintech that is all web devs solving problems that they only imagine exist will not.
A) There's no problem to be solved (which I think is your point), or
B) The problem looks unsolved because it's harder than it looks (e.g. payment fraud).
But I imagine there are spaces (e.g. consumer payments) where a pair of fresh eyes wouldn't suffer from either of the above.
I don't know whether companies like Revolut or Transferwise were founded by ex retail bankers, but I could imagine someone from outside the industry identifying the problems they solve, purely from their customer perspective.
could imagine someone from outside the industry identifying the problems they solve, purely from their customer perspective
That’s a fair point
I suppose though that probably short of artificial general intelligence there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for this because bookkeeping is too varied and complex.
If everyone agreed on a digital standard for sending invoices and receipts that’d be a first step (no, that standard isn’t PDF). Unfortunately, as long as there are even companies that still send paper invoices we still have a long way to go.
Some of these part need some company-specific work flow, but not much intelligence so can be coded by any internal dev team. But some parts (e.g. extracting the objective info from PDF or scan) are harder but more standardised, and could be provided as an API. Some other (allocating to the right accounts in the GL) should be automatable for 90% of invoices, just because most received invoices are for the same thing each month.
The tech is easy, meeting compliance and getting other businesses to integrate not so.
Here is a real issue: transaction speed of SEPA wire transfers.
Here is another issue: no fintech will be able to solve it, since fintechs are no banks, and (typical for "disruptive" startups) can not solve this for the whole system as it is a regulated system for tons of reasons.
So what could fintech really solve?
How about focussing on customer facing technology? A fintech proposing and providing an open standard for banking apps where security and compliance is enforced by default would at least one problem solved.