OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK A new study from Cornerstone Advisors, looking at who Americans open checking accounts with, underscores the growth of digital banks and fintechs like Chime, PayPal, and Square—and the decline of megabanks like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. What’s going on in…

One of the most common questions from banking leaders I hear right now is a variation on “Are Apple and Google coming to eat my lunch?” The question usually comes in one of two flavors: “Do the big tech firms want to become banks?” and “Do they want to access…

The FIS FIS Global Payments Report 2023 has some findings that confirmed some of my suspicions about the direction of payments travel in the U.S. These included the shift towards digital wallets, which became the single leading payment method among U.S. consumers shopping online in 2022 (with 32% of e-commerce…

Indonesia is the most important digital financial services market in Southeast Asia, given its overall size, unbanked population of 181 million, and island geography. With 6,000 populated islands, Indonesia is almost uniquely suited for branchless banking. It is thus no surprise that the region’s most prominent platform companies, all in…

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK A new survey from the Motley Fool reveals some surprising—and, frankly, hard to believe—statistics about Americans’ use of the Generative AI tool ChatGPT for financial advice. An email from Pollfish with the subject line “54% of Americans rely on ChatGPT for financial product recommendations”…

According to a new Bloomberg report, in the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) allegedly provided billions of dollars to insure deposits for some of SVB’s top customers, who happen to include some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. Bloomberg’s report is founded on…

In recent years, the biggest credit story in India has been buy now, pay later (BNPL). Tremendous demand for credit has driven the BNPL boom in the subcontinent, but tighter regulation and slower growth are both now inevitable. As BNPL slows in India, there is an opportunity for the overlooked…

We have exited the growth-at-any-cost era, so the startups that are able to extend their runway and drive profitable growth are most likely to survive. With global venture capital funding down 53%, to $76 billion, in the first quarter of 2023 according to Crunchbase, and the collapse of Silicon Valley…

Earlier this month, the payments world met in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, for Money20/20 Europe, one of the biggest events on the industry’s international calendar. But while the conference had the usual strong attendance, it had a far more muted tone than in previous years that reflects shifting trends within the…

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK They say that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. They need to add management fads to the list. Like other management trends (i.e., fads) before it—like reengineering, knowledge management, and Big Data, to name a few—innovation is the management fad…