Bankloch

With regulators worldwide becoming more and more demanding and processes to get licensed becoming more and more costly and complex,   obtaining a license from a regulatory authority has become a full business in its own . Not only are there (lawyer) firms (such as FLA = Financial Licensing Advisors, Simont Braun, Four & Five…​) specialized in composing these types of license files, but many financial service companies also try (often in very creative ways) all kind of work-arounds to avoid having to go through this painful and complex licensing process and this for multiple reasons: The   cost and effort spent on obtaining the license , i.e. not only the cost of writing and defending the filing, but also to make the necessary adaptations to processes and IT systems to comply with the imposed restrictions. E.g. in the US, Varo Money is considered to be the first consumer Fintech to obtain a nationwide banking license/bank charter (after approval of Federal Deposit Insurance...

While the word " Ecosystem " was almost unused in the financial services world a few years ago, today it is on the top of the agenda of every bank and insurance company. As always, with such a loaded term, it is important to take first a step back and oversee the bigger picture. Ecosystems in the financial services industry are a   logical evolution of a number of trends : The trend towards more   customer-centricity , i.e. it is important to service customers as part of their customer journey, meaning at the moment (time) and place (location) where it is most relevant for them and this with ultimate convenience, i.e. in the most frictionless, proactive, (hyper-)personalized and invisible way possible. This results in concepts like   embedded finance   and (banking) apps transforming into   super-apps . The trend to be   more open   with regards to data. With GDPR forcing companies to move ownership of data from the company collecting the data to the u...

In my blog " Customer acquisition cost: probably the most valuable metric for Fintechs " ( https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/06/customer-acquisition-cost-probably-most.html ) I described how a customer acquisition strategy can make or break a Fintech. In the traditional Retail sector, focused on selling different types of products for personal usage to end-customers,   customer acquisition  is just as important. No wonder that the advertisement sector is a multi-billion dollar industry. However in recent years due to the digitalization and consequently the rise of   Digital Marketing , customer acquisition has become much more focused on   delivering the right message via the right channel to the right person on the right time . Big tech players like Google and Facebook are specialized in this kind of targeted marketing, which is a key factor for their success and multi-billion valuations. Their exponential growth in marketing revenues seems however coming to a halt...