This is why I'm very wary watching foreign developments in the payment space. Living in a country where contscyless payments and free instant transactions were a thing long before Apple and Google arrived with their products, these services seem to add very little except for a foreign third party. Sure, PayPal was around in case you needed to buy something online in another country, but I don't believe it's as deeply ingrained.
At the same time I read stories about other countries where people think it's completely normal that some third party app has replaced the bank's role as a payment processor, even going so far as to include these services within the banking environment itself.
The way I see a large amount of fintech is that business savy people see their banks struggle to get up to standards that were common elsewhere ten years ago and try to make a quick buck throwing together an implementation before the banks can get themselves together. These companies solves the needs of the end customer, but only patch over the underlying problems that keep building up because there is no reason to address them anymore.
How much can you really trust a company built on profiting off the failings of a basic institution underlying almost all commerce?
As Schumpeter observed, value creation is accompanied by creative destruction, and right now it looks like we're in the "creative destruction" phase when it comes to fintech.
It was one thing when in the early 2000s creative destruction was involving entities like pets.com, no-one was really hurt by those companies going down, but it's another thing when the company going down might hold your "savings" or owe you money as a SME, like Revolut or Klarna.
At the same time I read stories about other countries where people think it's completely normal that some third party app has replaced the bank's role as a payment processor, even going so far as to include these services within the banking environment itself.
The way I see a large amount of fintech is that business savy people see their banks struggle to get up to standards that were common elsewhere ten years ago and try to make a quick buck throwing together an implementation before the banks can get themselves together. These companies solves the needs of the end customer, but only patch over the underlying problems that keep building up because there is no reason to address them anymore.
How much can you really trust a company built on profiting off the failings of a basic institution underlying almost all commerce?