Banks are boring & claim to be next generation bank is rarely heard in startup world. Banks were born out of need to store the cash safely. Banks generally have a very good perception of trust & security among masses which led to position themselves as one-stop shop for anything financial related. Over time they built the brand , distribution & resources to up-sell other financial products such as loans, insurance, money transfers etc.
As any other business, competition have started to hurt the banks. However, new entrants are not keen to attack the core competency of the bank i.e holding people’s money. The main reason behind lack of competition is the resource intensive regulatory process. With low ROI. it’s not worth the effort for startups. Although bank fees brings lot of revenue to the bank, holding money is not profitable. It’s more of a liability than an assets.
Startups will take away the profit-making products of banks leaving them with liabilities to hold cash only
When it comes to retention, banks are doing really good job. When was the last time you changed the bank ? As per a survey, approximately in any given year 3% of people change bank. While 57% of the people are with their bank for last 10 years, 37% people are still trusting their bank even after 20 years.
For startups, it is easy to launch other financial products due to less barrier to entry in terms of regulations. In no specific order, popular products are
- Lending
- Remittance
- Bill payments
- Credit card processing
- Insurance
- Hedge funds
- Credit cards
Lending being the most popular product, FinTech startups are focused on creating the most efficient P2P lending marketplace. As per Goldman Sach estimate, 20% of bank lending will move to alternative finance, costing 12 billion dollar in profit loss for the bank. This is 7% of total profits for the banking sector.
Over next few years, due to regulation burden, number of players in banking will reduce. More and more consolidation will happen in the industry due to shrinkage of profit margins. Industry have already started to search for solutions to sustain their retail locations with reducing operational expenses and innovating to compete with startups in term of products & services. Though they have an edge in term of resources, corporate culture makes it difficult to innovate.
It a race between Innovation vs distribution as beautifully written by Alex Rampell .Will FinTech startups be able to get the distribution first or banks will be able to innovate first ? Race is ON.