Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company | Hacker News Reader

Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company

a16z.com

35 pointsBrajeshwar17 comments

If there's a lesson from the ongoing collapse of GE, it should be "stay the fuck out of finance."

There's an interesting take that's opposite here which I don't see mentioned, which is that software businesses make absurd margins and right now the best place to put that money is in the pocket of their employees or new employees (or overseas, or in buybacks). That money could be put to use to increase their margins through financial services but personally I don't want to be a part of that.

Well financing allows you to charge higher prices.

Is anyone surprised a venture capital firm thinks every company should focus on money? Just like software companies think every company should live or die on tech, logistics companies think every company should live or die on logistics... seems like typical tunnel vision.

I feel like this whole article was written for some alternate reality where the only reason every company isn't a bank is that they don't have the infrastructure.

Banks are regulated for a long list of reasons, and allowing every company that wants to make money fast act like a bank is a really, really bad idea.

Money laundering, tax evasion, embezzlement and a thousand other white collar crimes will be vastly increased by increasing the number of corporations allowed to act as banks while not simultaneously providing regulatory frameworks. Imagine Paypal times 10,000.

> A survey by the World Economic Forum found that just 28 percent of the millennial and Gen Z generations trust their banks to be fair and honest.

Lol, they didn't do a survey about how much of Gen Z trust their tech companies. I'm not sure if FANG or tech startups would get as high as 28%.

Google is the most trusted brand for Gen Z in 2020 in this Morning Consult survey[1], followed by Netflix, Amazon, and then YouTube. Apple comes in at 14th place.

[1] https://morningconsult.com/most-trusted-brands/

Some key points to save anyone else having to look them up:

Yes, those five do score more than 28% with Gen Z, though still less than 50%, and by the time you're down to Apple, only just over 1/3 of people trust them to do the right thing even in Gen Z.

For comparison, Google/Netflix/Amazon are in the 40-45% range for Millennials, with YouTube at only 37.7% and Apple falling off the top-25 list and therefore below 33.8%.

Gen X and Boomers are less trusting still. YouTube and Apple don't even make the top-24 list for Gen X, and of the five mentioned in the parent comment, only Amazon makes it into the top 25 for Boomers. Those brands that did make it are still only in the 30-40% bracket for these age groups.

Oh, the irony of boomers not trusting tech companies while at the same time deeply trusting the Facebook group misinformation that is radicalizing them.

For those exposed to this industry for quite some time this change has been coming for years, take back control and reduce costs. One not need look far, the stock exchanges for example, to see all the payments companies going public and there are significantly more private entities "in the game" with more popping up every week. "Fee'd to death" I call it as I have been one of those middlemen several times. With so many middlemen in the mix it should come as ZERO surprise as it relates to all the cyber breaches since PCI is nothing more than reactionary to an exponentially growing issue now encompassing all other industries and the most impactful with be the health field, one CANNOT change their health records. PCI 4 is currently in RFC and slated to go live in 2024, yes 2024. Anyone think the crims are gonna hold off until "everyone that is compliant" can implement the new requirements?

I appreciate fintech companies as a number of them are FNACs [0] driving new use cases, combined with my actually quite good legacy bank taking inspiration from these, I can get the benefits of fintech, with the stability of an existing provider.

Personally I have no interest in another current account (e.g. I'm not moving my main account to Monzo, dropped them like a hot stone when they did away with the top-up debit card system).

[0] Feature, not a company

What benefits are you talking about here? I haven't seen a lot of legacy banks implement the things I find interesting in the fintech space.

Legacy banks seem quite reluctant to significantly change the way they view their products, which is what I'm looking for from fintech.

Having personally attended meetings in which banks and the US Federal Reverse were present I can reasonably inform you through direct knowledge of the matter that the US Federal Reserve is telling banks they MUST adopt technology to stay not only relevant but to even exist. Should anyone find it of interest just look at the small town bank buyouts and local branches closing up as this has been happening well before the current global situation and will only accelerate as the Old Boy network continues to resist. Everything changes in time, one just needs to have enough to wait.

Smart money saving pots, Open Banking, calendar view of payments, graphs and calculators for different transaction types, paperless statements, paperless loan applications, rewards with specific merchants. The actual useful stuff and none of the cruft.

Coming up with new ideas to innovate using tech is increasingly difficult as we are running out of “Problems to solve”. The video illustrates very well how a number of opportunities are opening in the financial / banking sector. Probably not a very interesting Read for someone not familiar with the sector.

This is why we need to take to space - we need new problems to solve. Asteroid mining and establishing a base on the moon seems a good near-term challenge.

We really dont though. It is one thing to say we need to get out into space, but its another to pretend like we dont have sustainability problems here on earth that will require similarly huge financial input. Lets get our house in order here before we change the conversation once more to how great those billionaire space jockeys are.

If you're in a functional lifeboat with some pinprick holes, it's better to stay than to jump into the sea in a life jacket.

This is a ludicrous statement on its face.

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