Once Upon A Time In The World Of Fintech...

We want to be at the heart of what’s next. With the speed of change in financial services and the continuation of disruption principles, we know it is overwhelming. We want to keep that experience at the heart of what we reflect to you. But why put hundreds of the best brains across every bit of fintech on stage if not to push the industry forward? There are meeting cattle calls and superficial virtual meetups. We know you’re not limited to ways to connect in our industry, so the WAY we communicate, the way we learn, and the way we as an ecosystem have to organize ourselves to really drive forward the most important concepts keeps evolving.

What an event should be and what content should be has changed. It’s time for practitioners and true experts to go deep.

The stages, the formats, and the speakers for this year will reflect that. Expect intimate environments, more opportunities for interaction, an orientation towards action, and more in-depth conversation.

That’s where you come in. You’re the hero of this story. We need heroes right now.

Hit us with your best,
ZAP

Fintech is a hashtag that has grown into an industry. Like most industries, it has evolved and grown up. It might even be time for a new term to define the future of this “fintech thing.”

The fintech upstarts that have long been considered disrupters could almost be considered incumbents. Plaid and Stripe may be private companies, but can we really call them startups anymore?

New companies are nipping at the heels of the fintech darlings of the past couple of decades. Well, not only new companies but incumbents as well.

Incumbents have embraced fintech in their own ways. The R&D dollars are starting to show that the incumbents can at least build feature parody and they’re deploying quicker and quicker.

The competition is coming from below and above.

This sets the stage for an entirely new crop of startups…

Looking back, we know Fintech began with the “Great Unbundling.” Innovators entered the space and disaggregated the big banks. They built individual solutions that provided a better UX, and so much more.

That great unbundling drove more aggregate innovation and pushed the incumbents to come up to speed and provide what consumers wanted.

Then came the age of the re-bundle. Turns out consumers didn’t want a separate app for every piece of their financial life.

It’s not all about consumers these days. If anything, we’ve moved into the age of B2B. The venture dollars are flowing into B2B and the use cases are innumerable.

Could it be the last frontier of fintech innovation? Absolutely not! It is, however, the next step in technology's journey into the financial industry.

There’s more than one company claiming to be the B2B payment platform. As with so much of fintech innovation, these problems aren’t unsolved. They’re simply being solved with convoluted UX and antiquated technology.

B2B comes in many forms. Consider medical payments, insurtech, and the like. Many are B2B2C, some of C2B2B.

These are convoluted markets with heavy regulation, but look at what we’ve done in banking-centric fintech in ten years. What could the same principles applied to lookalike industries do for society?

The fruit hangs low to improve the user experience and the potential for zero-to-one innovation without a huge amount of technical debt to recover from will create an entirely new competitive landscape for some incumbents that haven’t had to deal with real competition in decades.

What’s next?

2024 is a year of fundamentals both in terms of financials and technology.

The banking industry has reached a point of no return when it comes to digital offerings. A roadmap to a seamless online account opening won’t cut it in 2024. It’s time to execute. If your bank does not have the table stakes digital product experience starting in 2025, the future looks bleak. The inability for a consumer or business to interact with their finances online simply won’t cut it in the age of AI.

On the fintech side, profitable models have overtaken the “grow at all costs” remit from investors. We were a bit exuberant, but we’ve corrected. It may even be one of those rare moments of equilibrium before money gets cheap again and things start to get going, especially in the public markets.

Could the focus on profitability and the general return to responsible spending lead to an explosion in IPOs? Will the floodgates open, or will the phenomenon of private giants continue?

The public markets aren’t the only hope for liquidity. The M&A boom is here. To acquire or be acquired is a question for many.

Alternative players are also feeling brighter. Bitcoin has rallied, but aside from that, we have finally turned the corner from crypto hype about pricing to real crypto utility.

“The future will be tokenized” is ringing truer and truer every day.

Where are your hopes springing up?

Value exchange and value transfer are going global at speeds heretofore unseen. The regulatory clarity with the impending open finance rules will light the rocket engines on this already fast-paced market. On the other hand, the fraudsters aren’t far behind (see Certainty in Uncertainty).

Open banking will be seen as a financial tectonic shift in future textbooks, but we’re in the earliest of innings, and broad adoption is just beginning. As policy becomes clearer, nation-states and private companies alike are leading in different ways, but it will continue to be an international opportunity. Globalization is driving us forward.

No international finance conversation would be complete without taking into account the power dynamics shifting in economic centers worldwide. The dollar may be losing its dominance as the global reserve currency, as other currencies are being utilized for trade and other tools for exchange are growing.

New systems like India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix in the global south are changing the dynamics of growth and trade as the U.S. moves as fast as it can toward a seamless real-time payments system.

What would those shifting dynamics mean for the future of fintech?

What’s the name of a group of Black Swans? A Bank. A Bank of Black Swans.

Feels a little too accurate, doesn’t it? We are living in an age of uncertainty.

Recent history makes the worst easy to imagine. Wise businesses across our industry are doing their best to prepare for the unexpected. How do banks and fintechs prepare for the next Black Swan event?

With fraud at an all-time high, criminals are operating at the same scale as the world’s most sophisticated fraud-fighting technologies. The battle against fraud has become a war.

Artificial intelligence has entered the fray. Some are already leveraging the technology in impressive ways. Others aren’t sure what they can do with the technology, but the pressure from the Board to do something, anything is strong.

Amidst the uncertainty, there is an air of optimism for the future.

What are you doing to prepare your business for growth amidst the uncertainty?

Data has powered decision-making for some time now, but the spring of artificial intelligence and machine learning products has opened the industry's eyes to what good, clean, contextualized data can mean for a business. The key is good data and understanding the ways to organize it. So, how do we begin to organize, clean, refine, and distribute this vast resource?

AI begins with good data but doesn’t end there. Some are clear on their AI strategy. Others aren’t sure what they should do with the technology, but the pressure from every board to do something, anything is strong.

Many questions remain. What’s the killer use case? How can AI be leveraged in an industry that values transparency in decision-making?

Despite the headlines, innovation in 2024 isn’t just about AI. The landscape is becoming friendlier for new upstarts. It's a time to create value - and rediscover new problems seeking new solutions. Even the rumors of the death of consumer fintech may be premature.

But how do we honor the nature of thinking differently? We should be looking for those that zig when everyone else zags.

Be ambitious when others are fearful. Be bullish when the status quo is bearish. That is the motto for counterintuitive innovation.

The echo chamber is stronger than ever. We want to hear your counterintuitive, contrarian perspective on all this “hotness.”