Bankloch

  The time that banking and insurance services were the exclusive domain of the financial services sector and vice-versa that banks and insurers were only focusing on pure banking and insurance services (like payments, cards, investments, credits and life and non-life insurance products) is long gone. With customers becoming more and more demanding for end-to-end user journeys, where financial services are an integral part of, we see the   rise of cross-sector ecosystems , i.e. On the one hand we have   financial service companies   building   services of adjacent sectors   or partnering with start-ups and scale-ups of adjacent sectors and integrating them in their platforms On the other hand,   players from other sectors   are   embedding   more and more   financial services   in their products, allowing to offer the best possible user experience. Most known examples are large retailers (supermarkets) offering all kinds of fin...

  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 ...

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...