Results tagged “fintech”

"Regulation needs to catch up with innovation" - Henry Paulson, Banker, 74^th Secretary of Treasury - US.

Traditionally, banks have relied on policy, procedure and people to comply with regulations, rather than on technology - most repeatable compliance processes are mostly handled manually.

It is a known fact that regulatory pressure on banks has been increasing since 2008. BCG reports that the number of regulations that a bank has to track on a daily basis has increased from approximately 60 in 2011 to a whopping 200 in 2015. Strategic response of banks has been to handle the increasing regulatory pressure via process and people, hiring more staff for compliance. At one point, Citibank was reported to have 30,000 employees working on regulatory compliance. Despite this, European and North American Banks have collectively paid USD 321 billion in compliance fees in the period from 2008 to 2016. With increasing regulatory pressures, high costs of litigation and compliance fees, shrinking margins and shortage of compliance experts, banks are now looking at fine tuning this process in order to ensure compliance and avoid costly fees, as well as, keep running costs low.

The rise of financial startups has taken bank bashing to new levels. FinTech has become a metaphor for all that banks should but could never be. Enough and more has been said about what banks need to learn, not to mention fear, from their new rivals.

But there is always another side to every story, and the spate of FinTech-bank collaborations is proof of that. Why else would FinTech companies do a U-turn to partner with the same banks they were supposed to slay? The truth is that while financial startups are doing some things right, they still have a lot to learn and gain from their traditional banking rivals.

In recent years, the Bank, that grand edifice of solidity and security from days past, has come under threat from sources ranging from regulators to customers to fraudsters to legacy technology. And today, it stands on the threshold of a new challenger - the technology-driven non-banking player, which sadly is getting into the heart of its business. The Fintech firms and the technology heavyweight (such as Apple, Google and Microsoft) are the prime challengers in this category.