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Comment by zucchini_head | Hacker News Reader

Being serious here: What exactly is a "fintech" company? Every financial company on earth that isn't in someone's backyard is at-heart now purely technological (computers, algos, tracking, databases, etc.). So what makes a "fintech" company? Is it a super _ultra_ technological bank?

In summary, what are fintech companies exactly doing?

Part of me believes it's the new version of "crypto-", but i will hold my breath.

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I'd say that "fintech" companies are the union of financial companies that are aggressively becoming "tech" companies and the tech companies that have enough funding, patience, and grit to deal with regulatory and various other challenges for a financial entity (though the definition of a "financial entity" varies from country to country)

It's not the new version of "crypto-" (if anything it's the old version as they've been around a while), but it can indeed just be a hypeword

The distinction is pretty much the same as the distinction between "tech" and "other" companies in other fields

Technology is more fundamental to how a company aims to be better than the competition (or at least how it markets itself as better than the competition). Which in practice often means having software doing exactly the same thing as software in other companies, but less bricks and mortar, customer service and established reputation.

Everything Morgan Stanley or HSBC does depends on computers and their bottom line is hugely affected by the quality of things like their trading algorithms, but "better software" is less intrinsic to why people would consider using them than, say a "Fintech" oriented challenger bank, or a HFT fund, or a stock recommendation report marketing itself as being purely "Big Data" driven.

Having worked in traditional fintech firms like trading platforms, exchanges, algo traders etc for last 15 years, I feel many of the new gen companies are just trying to be cool by calling them fintech.

I have a friend who started a company which manages travel rewards and was pitching his startup as 'disruptive fintech'.

I mean, I'd classify my startup as a fintech company (at least from the outside):

Https://projectpiglet.com

I'll tell that to investors, people who click the link, etc. That's because it describes that I'm working with / in the financials space (aka financial statistics, and investing as it relates to assets of some kind).

Now... I personally, classify the company is a "human analytics" company. The system learns about people. Off the platform I can build insider threat detection (if deployed within companies), I can build a search engine for experts / people, I have a way to track brand strength, sentiment around politians, create curated news updates provided via email, etc. Even track the "strength" of a mene

All those are already on the platform or are demos...

Is it a fintech company? Yes, to people looking for fintech, but is it also A, Y, and Z - sure. Defining what a company does is difficult in some cases; fintech is currently what is describing anything really working with money and / assets to make money.

The definition seems to be wide. My 'fintech' startup [0] focuses on automated bookkeeping, but depending on who you ask, automated bookkeeping is or is not regarded financial technology.

[0] https://parsey.nl

Nearly same boat here. We're based in Frankfurt where everyone is talking about FinTech so its natural to call our Accounting/Bookkeeping/Billing AI Startup [0] a Fintech, but to me initially the term was reserved for startups that process creditcards or do algotrading. I'm content now to use the term as long as its helpful.

[0] https://www.fastbill.com

This is off topic. But what do you use to generate the api documentation? It's very clean, love it.

https://www.fastbill.com/api/fastbill/en/fundamentals.html#i...

This was a homegrown solution by a student that worked for us. It's not auto generated and quite frankly painful to maintain as it just generates this html in php via parsing xml files. We're looking for alternatives at the moment too.

Any financial company based on modern tech/data that are not necessarily a big bank slash mega corp?

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