Category: Financing, Banking, Inclusion & SMBs
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SME Lending Fintech-Style – Part 2: Financing Context
To unlock small and midsize enterprise (SME) lending requires addressing a complex problem with multiple parts. Alternative financing is part of the solution, but so is improving cost-efficiency of bank lending. With funding gaps in the billions, all financing channels will need to be made more productive and will require improvements to the way SMEs…
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SME Lending Fintech-Style – Part 1: Ecosystem
Financial institutions are staffed by experienced, well-educated, highly paid individuals. Do they need to partner with financial technology (fintech) firms or bring in consultants– surely they can throw money at any problem? Perhaps. But as 19th and 20th century economic examples of Comparative Advantage teaches us, combining powerful with nimble can offer positive outcomes. Banks…
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Banks finally readying to crash the fintech party?
There’s no shortage of opinions on how the banking industry will be reshaped. Quite popular, are predictions of banks relegated to boring (regulated) infrastructure & verification services, augmented by a multitude of slick UX, machine-learned fintech players delighting impatient, ‘fed-up-with-the mediocre’ consumers. In a previous post asking how we want to ‘Uberize’ (disrupt) banking, I…
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Do we really want banking ‘Uberized’? Part 1
Do we want to ‘Uberize’ banking to improve it, in the same way as taxis and hotels? Even for those working within the tech ecosystem, it’s hard to keep pace with the impact digitization and software continues to have on processes and competitive balance across industries. Venture capital seems to love talk about disrupting fragmented…
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Rebalancing the financial services workforce
It’s been an interesting start to the year. Falling oil prices, stock market dampening and China-led slowdown have kept us occupied while snowstorms, rains and floods do their thing. On the international stage, a few key themes seem to have been dominating Davos: while the year’s burning security, humanitarian and energy and political realities are…
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How do we fill 60 million empty bank accounts?
Last year the Indian government embarked on a financial inclusion drive of massive proportion. The fruit of this labour: 160+ million bank accounts for the underserved. Wow. The government’s identity card scheme (that made this achievable) notwithstanding, still a substantive achievement. But with all the best intentions, these accounts are not yet doing what…
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Is regulation contributing to ‘disrupted’ financial services?
I tend to get more passionate about this idea as the evening progresses. A few years ago, a trickle of fintech startups started offering alternatives to traditional financial services. Lending, payments, FX, savings, borrowing, wealth management were among the first targets, all of whom expanded the trickle to a flood. Narrowing it down to lending,…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 3
In part 2 of this post, I was faced with a difficult choice in 2013: change direction and focus of the current startup, or start fresh. Starting fresh meant admitting failure, and in some ways, giving up. And I don’t like giving up! In my mind, by keeping it going I was fanning the embers…