Bankloch

The word   Fintech   (short for "Financial Technology") was   first recorded in the 1980’s   in the Sunday Times. However it was only until the financial crisis of   2007-2008 , that the usage of the   term became more widespread . The resulting lack of trust in the traditional financial system inspired many tech-entrepreneurs to create new start-ups (often strongly VC backed) to compete with the financial industry, which was considered before the crisis as an impregnable fortress impossible to disrupt. As the below Google Search graph depicts, it was however only   about 5 years ago , that the   term really became mainstream . As always, the more "buzzy" the term became, the more difficult it became to give a unique, commonly accepted definition for it. Initially the term was used for   tech-players competing directly with the incumbent banks , by offering banking services directly to end-customers (B2C or B2B), strongly backed by technology...

Marketplaces are on the rise ! A digital marketplace is an online platform, where different third-parties connect and   supply and demand can be matched . This supply/demand can be a specific product or service, but can also facilitate a full customer journey, by matching products and services of multiple vendors for each step of the journey (e.g. a customer journey of going on holiday can include flight tickets, travel insurance, hotel reservation, car rental…​). Marketplaces are however not new. Newspapers, shopping malls, auction places, travel agencies…​ have been creating marketplaces for centuries. The revolution of the internet allows however to scale-out a digital marketplace exponentially, while keeping costs relatively flat and make it 24/7 available across the whole world. Digital marketplaces are however   not all success stories . Less than 10 percent of start-up digital marketplaces will become profitable. This poor success rate is mainly caused by 3 factors: Fie...

“ The future of coding is no coding at all ” - Chris Wanstrath (CEO at GitHub). Mid May I posted a blog on RPA (Robotic Process Automation -   https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/05/rpa-miracle-solution-for-incumbent.html ) on how this technology, promises the world to companies. A very similar story is found with low- and no-code platforms, which also promise that business people, with limited to no knowledge of IT, can create complex business applications. These   platforms originate , just as RPA tools,   from the growing demand for IT developments , while IT cannot keep up with the available capacity. As a result, an enormous gap between IT teams and business demands is created, which is often filled by shadow-IT departments, which extend the IT workforce and create business tools in Excel, Access, WordPress…​ Unfortunately these tools built in shadow-IT departments arrive very soon at their limits, as they don’t support the required non-functional requirements (like h...