The FinTech revolution continues to transform the financial industry and related services. Start-ups and incumbents are in a fierce battle for customers. To put it in numbers, in the first half of last year alone, FinTech investment had exceeded more than $57 billion. Which was more than the entire amount of 2017. By October 2018, thirty so-called FinTech unicorns had reached the magic number of $1 billion in market value.
However, we are often confounded by buzzwords or confuse different products and services when we speak about FinTech. Financial Technology has been around for decades, but it is the latest wave of innovation that has made the transformation of financial services possible and while it has claimed a dominant role in our daily (financial) lives, there seems a widespread misperception as to what FinTech actually is. It is not limited to people outside the remit of finance. The idea for “#FinTech – An introduction to the different sectors, innovative technologies and hashtags that transform the financial industry” was born after a conversation between two lawyers two ago. The first, a partner in a City law firm, had heard marvellous things about the revolution that was to transform the world he was living in. So the other, sympathetic to his friend, started to explain what all these buzzwords and hashtags mean. It was the foundation of a series of articles posted on PlanetCompliance that covered the revolution of business lending to capital markets trading to insurance to real estate investing to wealth management – to name just a few of the several aspects of finance that have been digitised and reinvented.
Because of the great feedback and the speed, with which this FinTech revolution is changing the face of financial and related services, we went to review, rewrite, update and extend the original material. The result is the latest PlanetCompliance eBook that aims to bring some clarity to the conversations that take place in financial hubs and elsewhere around the world. It discusses the various subcategories of FinTech and looks at some of the key players in the different sectors. It uses real life examples to show how start-ups disrupt the status quo and how incumbents respond to the new challenges. It explains the technology and innovations that changes the world of finance as we know it.
“#FinTech – An introduction to the different sectors, innovative technologies and hashtags that transform the financial industry” – Out now and available here.