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What is FinTech?
Financial technologyFinTech for short
describes the evolving intersection of
financial services and technology.
Startups use technology to offer existing financial services at lower costs, and to offer new tech -driven
solutions. Incumbent financial firms look to acquire or work with startups to drive innovation.
Technology companies provide payment tools. These can all be seen as FinTech.
Look bey ond the name and y oull see some of the most ex citing industry developments in a generation.
We caught up with Haskell Garfinkel and Dean Nicolacakis , PwCs US FinTech Practice co -leads, to
better understand the FinTech ecosystem.
Questions and answers
Q. Whos doing this? What does a ty pical Q. In a recent presentation, Haskell referred
FinTech company look like? to FinTech as a v erb. What ex actly did he
mean by that?
A. When people think of FinTech, they often
focus on startups, breaking into areas that A. FinTech isnt static. We see it as the
banks and other legacy financial institutions ev olving intersection of financial services and
hav e dominated. But we think about all the technology. When we talk about the As, Bs,
play ers in a larger FinTech ecosystem, which Cs, and Ds, we think of them as sectors in
we refer to as the A s, Bs, Cs, and Ds: motion, all moving toward each other over
time.
As are large, well-established financial
institutions such as Bank of America, For ex ample, financial institutions are
Chase, Wells Fargo, and Allstate. We becoming more technology focused. At the
sometimes refer to these as same time, big tech companies are offering
incumbents. peer-to-peer payment solutions over social
Bs are big tech companies that are active networks and email. Meanwhile, disruptors
in the financial serv ices space but not are prov iding financial services that, until
ex clusively so, such as Apple, Google, recently, y ou could get only from banks or
Facebook, and Twitter. financial adv isors.
Cs are companies that provide
Q. Where hav e y ou seen the most disruption
infrastructure or technology that
facilitates financial services in financial serv ices so far?
transactions. This broad group includes
companies like MasterCard, Fiserv, First A. FinTech disruptors started by offering
Data, v arious financial market utilities, products and services in pay ments and peer-
and ex changes such as NASDAQ. to-peer lending. Because of this, these have
been the most disrupted areas to date. We
Ds are disruptors: fast-moving
can think of this as FinTech 1 .0, in which
companies, often startups, focused on a
new market entrants have focused largely in
particular innovative technology or
the business-to-consumer (B2C) space. 1
process. Companies include Stripe
(mobile pay ments), Betterment
(automated investing), Prosper (peer-to-
peer lending), Mov en (retail banking),
and Lemonade (insurance).
1
Of the many inaugural FinTech unicorns (the term that ref ers to companies with v aluations of US $1 billion or more), most had core businesses f ocused on B2C lending
and pay ments.
FinTech Q&A 2
Q. What do y ou see unfolding over the next For incumbent financial institutions to
1 2 months? succeed, theyll have to do three things well:
2
For more inf ormation on blockchain, see PwC Financial Serv ices Institute, Making sense of bitcoin, cry ptocurrency, and blockchain PwC, Feb 2016.
3
For more inf ormation on our new platf orm f ocused on the impact of FinTech innov ation on f inancial serv ices, v isit http://www.strategy and.pwc.com/denovo.
FinTech Q&A 3
www.pwc.com/fsi
Additional information
For additional information about this FinTech Q&A
A publication of PwCs
or PwCs Financial Serv ices Practice, please contact: Financial Services Institute
Ma r ie Carr
Pr incipal
Haskell Garfinkel
(31 2) 404-3792 Ca thryn Marsh
FSI Leader
haskell.garfinkel@pwc.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/haskellgarfinkel Joh n Abrahams
Dir ector
Ry an Alvanos
Senior Manager
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