An Industry At Crossroads
A Look At The State of FinTech Today
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Change before you have to — Jack Welch
Knowing others is intelligence. Knowing yourself is true wisdom — Tao Te Ching
The FinTech industry is now in it’s youth. It is no longer the new kid on the block. Rather, it is a paradigm that incumbents are adopting.While Lean, Agile and Sprints have entered the common lexicon of bankers, regulations are slowly making their impact felt on FinTech startups as they chose to imitate the very entities they sought to disrupt. The concept of core competence is never more important than today. But then,as some would say, it was always about client service.This article examines the state of FinTech today and provides a framework to analyze the future.
While the year 2016 was a very exciting year overall, I was looking forward to a great end to that year by travelling home to my family in India. Every year, just like clockwork, my mind tries to approximate the height of the tallest building hiding the bright sun from plain sight in the bustling megalopolis.
What surprises me is my overall impression about how similar, rather than dissimilar, global mega cities are. Amidst the constant urgency of catching the local metro to get to work, people sometimes forget to enjoy the bright sun or the light wind rustling through trees on the road. In fact, if peoples’ minds were silent enough, I am sure some of them could hear the birds chirping over the din of hawkers and constant cacophony of horns signaling a growing wave of frustration with how slow the traffic is moving on the roads. A stark contrast in neighborhoods, overflowing dumpsters and a slew of luxury cars paint a vivid portrait of change and constancy co-existing in the same moment. A bit like quantum superposition.
I could have used the same words to describe the FinTech landscape in India. Today, Asian unicorns backed by innovation, and demographic dividends are replicating and leapfrogging western counterparts in some respects. That is the dissimilarity which is…
