I'd be terrified to entrust my money to a startup 'disrupting' the financial industry with a slick UI or Android app. Financial companies have their value in mi

I'd be terrified to entrust my money to a startup 'disrupting' the financial industry with a slick UI or Android app. Financial companies have their value in minimizing risk, not in the UI or frontend[1]. Actually transferring money is dead simple: I can sign a piece of paper(even electronically) agreeing to pay someone $500 in the future. That paper carries the same weight as money, but its value is reduced by the risk of default or the hassle of going through the court system to collect. People who correctly guess who will actually deliver on their word can make money by buying that $500 at a discount(say $480). It's too easy to make a bunch of deals showing $20 profits on the books that are really $480 losses that show up years after. Financial companies will often play a big financial risk shell-game where they'll take on a certain risk to make money, but defer other risks to a different company in a big chain. ACH transfers and credit card merchant accounts are two examples(a chain of banks taking risk transferring money, or a chain of merchant->sales agent->bank->visa/mastercard for chargeback risk). The only reason US mortgages are so cheap in the first place is because they get immediately sold to a government-sponsored company. My local bank actually has a lot of value because I've had an account with them for 8 years: They can easily see I'm not a big risk to them, so they can deal with me without worrying too much. They can give references to other financial institutions. It's too easy to get eaten by fraud as a tech company. The tech is really the least important part of being in finance. The hard part is in trusting your customers. The loan officer takes weeks to pore through documents because these increase the banks' ability to trust you on the deal. They spend hundreds of dollars contracting appraisal companies to physically inspect the property again and again because it slightly reduces the chance of a bad deal. If a tech company can do this cheaper, then they can sell this service directly to the banks and make billions. Any data that you would collect on your web app, the banks could probably demand documentation for as part of the loan process. [1] Okay, Paypal makes it easy for me to transfer money internationally, so that's something of a UI issue with being able to interface with N countries' different banks. But I bet their internal meetings talk about how to gather enough information on merchants/people in Greece so as to minimize the risk of default, rather than the technical issues of interfacing with Greek banks.