Bankloch

  In some of my previous blogs (cfr. " Is a new bank consolidation wave inevitable? " -   https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2021/03/is-new-bank-consolidation-wave.html   and " Neobanks should find their niche to improve their profitability " -   https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/12/neobanks-should-find-their-niche-to.html ) I already shared my opinion that it will be hard for neo-banks to survive as long as they focus on a too generic service offering and that they have more chance of success if they   choose a well-targeted customer segment and focus on that . While traditional financial players, have often focused on all customers to gain maximum scaling effects (with a few exceptions like Private Banks), neo-banks with their   pure digital-footprint and ability to deliver interesting digital value-added services , are ideally positioned to   service niche-segments . Additionally, it is almost impossible for incumbent banks to compete with neo-banks on those niches,

Last week I had the pleasure again to attend the yearly   Digital Finance Summit (DFS) in Brussels   (organized by Fintech Belgium). As each year, this was a super-interesting and fully-packed day of interesting panels, keynotes and networking, allowing to get a good update of what’s living in the Fintech scene in general and in the Fintech scene in Belgium in particular. Not surprisingly the challenges, but also the opportunities are enormous and this both for the incumbent financial players as for the new Fintech start-ups and scale-ups. Obviously coping with challenges is intrinsic to doing business, but new is that the current challenges (like Global Warming, Covid relaunch, exploding costs of living, shifting global powers…​) are global in nature and arriving faster and faster (due to the hyper-connected and hyper-informed times we live in). This means every financial organization should be extremely   resilient to adapt quickly to a continuously changing environment . This requir