Without being an expert on the topic I'm going hazard a guess that it's due to regulatory moats that keep challengers out of the arena, and banks endlessly lobby to maintain that regulatory capture.
No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
231–240 of 452 posts
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#232Disrupt cancer if you can. Don’t disrupt functioning system that is not broken.
I really hope this is satire.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting... We've had scanned check deposits at Chase (US) for at least 15 years, I think.
Cheque use in the UK is now around two per year per person. (This includes business-to-business cheques.) The over-65 age group is most likely to use them, and least likely to use an app, so you can see why it wasn't a big priority for most banks. It's been at least 15 years since the banks stopped giving account holders chequebooks by default. If you want one you have to ask.
I get a couple of cheques a year from family in the UK. It's an infrequent transaction but an important one, and cheque scanning is actually the only reason I maintain my legacy bank account.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#234Without being an expert on the topic I'm going hazard a guess that it's due to regulatory moats that keep challengers out of the arena, and banks endlessly lobby to maintain that regulatory capture.
In the UK there's no significant regulatory advantage to big banks outside of the mortgage market, yet the same dynamics occur. The biggest issue for new digital banks is customer acquisition cost. Most consumers won't change bank accounts unless you spend hundreds of pounds on adverts and incentives.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. I don't really give this argument much credence any more. If the value of, say, gold or diamonds were to drop their practical-use-floor-value, they'd be valued at probably less than 1% (maybe much less) of current value. I mean, how much gold is actually consumed by industry? And we even have industrial diamon…
> A friend argued to me that crypto is "A Terrible Thing" because its just used to fuel the (illegal) narcotics industry. That's a good thing, though. Jokes aside, as a person who loves crypto technologically and agrees with the more cipherpunk roots of bitcoin, I have not seen anyone serious use crypto for anything other than drugs or small transactions, just for the sake of it. People usually just seems to hoard th…
> a person who loves crypto technologically and agrees with the more cipherpunk roots of bitcoin
Yep, that'd be me too. What gets my blood pressure rising is the sheer amount of coins & tokens available now all of which, bar perhaps a tiny fraction, seem to have no value proposition other than "number go up". To me, NFTs are the nadir of this concept. I struggle to imagine a legitimate use case for any crypto that doesn't involve rapid, frictionless transacting.
For example, there are a couple of fantastic services, like "Cauldron DEX" or "BCHBull" (no affiliation) - smart contracts which allow for trustless swapping of tokens. The concept is genius and the execution here seems very good (to me, non cryptographer) but, again, what can I do with these tokens or coins I've traded except trade them later for some other token or coin?
BCHBull seems to allow exposure to commodities and some fiat currencies - that makes it comparable I suppose to actual currency or commodity speculation which has been going on for centuries. One might still argue "what can I do with all this gold except trade it later for oil?" but, well, that seems to be a weaker criticism.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. I don't really give this argument much credence any more. If the value of, say, gold or diamonds were to drop their practical-use-floor-value, they'd be valued at probably less than 1% (maybe much less) of current value. I mean, how much gold is actually consumed by industry? And we even have industrial diamon…
The actual market value of diamonds is pretty low. You can pay a jeweler a lot of money for a shiny diamond, but good luck reselling it for a similar amount of money. Gold, OTOH, is fungible. You can melt it, mold it into different shapes bars, resell it, etc.
With diamond jewelry, you pay mostly for the manual work of jeweler since folks don't go to jewelry shops to buy a diamond stone alone. If we talk about gold bars, no sophisticated manual work involved, just pouring molten gold into some mold on semi-industrial automated scale.
If you buy sophisticated golden jewelry, you also pay ton for work that nobody else may appreciate. Sure you can get it smelted into something else, but you burn most of the original value, and some more on the change itself.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it could also be cultural. In my country people are perfectly happy to have a video chat with a bank employee about mortgages but in other country's you still need to go into a branch office for that kind of thing.
Just curious, why do you need a video chat? Can't you just have a phone call? I don't get the need to see someone's face
I don't get the need for synchronous comms at all. I can book airplane tickets, food delivery, e-commerce generally, and most other things through a web interface. Not sure why I need to talk to somebody to get a mortgage aside from Know Your Customer but even then a short signing ceremony at the end would be best.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#238The products being pointed out in this article as an attempt to disrupt banks seem to be basically the same product for a different price. Like, a high-yield savings account is just a savings account with a better price, right? How do you disrupt an industry by selling the same products? The advantage of startups is that they're more nimble, can pivot to fit the market better, and can adapt to customer requests faste…
One datapoint: On /r/PersonalFinanceCanada a very common advice is to save money in WealthSimple or Questrade type of online financial institutions. And people seem to be very happy with doing this. Any financial institution that makes the act of investing money simple and legible will win some market share. I have some savings accounts in RBC Canada, and the UX seems to be designed by monkeys throwing around crayons…
Come to Germany and try Deutsche Bank. Those monkeys are just throwing !@#$# at the wall. Moving from the US to Germany is like taking a time machine to another era when it comes to online banking.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is basically impossible to license a new bank in Germany and the financial regulations have become stricter over time, with a full banking license being mandatory for more and more things. It's kind of disturbing. If you are a big bank, you already have all the licenses and can do everything so what difference does that regulation make in practice?
N26 did it but creating a new bank attracts money launderers and scammers. The legal department costs are infeasible and half a century-old systems are not easy to adapt to new banking concepts. The government and regulation side of the system needs serious improvements in Germany to bring them to 21st century first. However, there is little economic incentive to do so. With an aging population and deeply conservativ…
> The current governing parties will probably lose the election next month because they made costly infrastructure fixes.
Germany is heading / has bet on a completely different direction than actual real world out there is moving to. The unability to admit massive failures and adapt is glaringly obvious even from outside, and literally fucks up whole EU left and right. Germany and its population has tremendous potential, we all know it, yet it looks like headless chicken running around yard with no positive future that I can see.
I don't care who will rule there, nobody outside understands nor cares about detailed internals of Germany. But, for a change, please put there somebody competent who can steer country and a bit whole continent as a consequence, has respect of peers and adversaries and can do necessary changes to keep it all afloat. Current and past leadership was and is... don't have a nice name, so better not describe it. Massive damage across whole EU. Weak EU then invites dictators to try to test its strength.
Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones
#240The products being pointed out in this article as an attempt to disrupt banks seem to be basically the same product for a different price. Like, a high-yield savings account is just a savings account with a better price, right? How do you disrupt an industry by selling the same products? The advantage of startups is that they're more nimble, can pivot to fit the market better, and can adapt to customer requests faste…
This is a very US centric article, a lot of the disruptions listed are incumbent 'big bank' products in other jurisdictions. I feel the lack of adaptability is likely a result of US market conditions/regulations rather than lack of innovation.
The EU also has put pressure on Banks for decades now to either "innovate" or "get innovated" by regulations forcing them to implement innovative ideas not coming from them.
With both having happened over time.
They also at least somewhat try to compete with Paypal on online payment on EU specific shops (not they they have much success, not just because of network effect but because a combination of their products being sub-par and them realizing that various other even less competitive/ux friendly competitors would make them more money if anyone would just be using it..., so they are in the process to "get innovated" again by forcing impl. of certain ideas related to person-to-person money transfer which have proven to work/being useful in a few countries where they/their banks did adapt them years ago.)