Bankloch

Thanks to Open Banking, embedded banking and banks positioning their apps as super-apps, the financial sector becomes more and more an   ecosystem of parties collaborating together   to execute upon a customer’s journey and needs. As a result, more and more banks and Fintechs sign partnerships with other financial players and players from other industries, in order to deliver   value-added services wherever, whenever and however the customer desires . Some examples: Banks (like KBC or Belfius in Belgium) offering   third party services in their banking app , like buying mobility services (train, bus, metro, shared bikes, shared cars, parking…​), buying cinema and amusement parc tickets, consulting social vouchers (like Monizze), recharging pre-paid phone cards…​ Banks and insurers   offering financial products via third parties  in context of a specific user product journey. E.g. offering mortgages and home insurances in a real estate search engine (e.g. in Belgium Belfius in ImmoVlan

Silo thinking   is often frowned upon in the industry. It is often a synonym for bureaucratic processes and politics and in almost every article describing the threats of new innovative Fintech players on the banking industry, the strong bank product silos are put forward as one of the main blockages why incumbent banks are not able to (quickly) react to the changing customer expectations. Customers want solutions to their problems   and do not want to be bothered about the internal organisation of their bank. Most banks are however organized by product domain (daily banking, investments and lending) and by customer segmentation (retail banking, private banking, SMEs and corporates). This division is reflected both at business and IT side and almost automatically leads to the creation of silos. It is however difficult to reorganize a bank without creating new silos or introducing other types of issues and inefficiencies. An organization is never ideal and needs to take a number of cons

Before the financial crisis (especially in the 90s) it seemed that the banking landscape was   strongly consolidating , resulting in a handful of Tier-1 (often international) banks in every country. After the financial crisis, many specialists predicted that due to the rising costs for compliance and lower revenues due to low interest rates and increased capital requirements, this   trend would be further accelerated   (especially the international consolidation), even though at the same time regulators were also pushing banks to become smaller (to avoid banks becoming " too big to fail "). Now a bit more than 10 years after the financial crisis, the contrary seems true. Very few banks have closed their doors and M&As have also been limited (especially the cross-border M&As). E.g. in the list of 10 largest Fintech/bank M&A deals in 2020, only 3 involve a bank initiating the deal, cfr.   https://www.fintechfutures.com/2020/12/top-10-fintech-and-bank-ma-deals-of-202