Here is a revealing fact. Trading in FX has been electronic since well before the age of the internet, with EBS being setup to compete with Reuters as early as

Here is a revealing fact. Trading in FX has been electronic since well before the age of the internet, with EBS being setup to compete with Reuters as early as 1990. Still, as soon as transactions are bigger than some small nominal amount (say, 5m USD notional), inevitably, they're transacted human to human, to this day. Sure, many transactions in total size are larger than that, done in smaller electronic chunks, but as soon as there is a real, single-flow risk, many humans simply like to deal with another human. Twenty five years later. The facts is that, when you're risking large amounts of money, and I have been a portfolio manager and self-analysed why, despite being a techie, I was uncomfortable putting large risks through a machine, the fact is that you want re-assurance. You want a person to guide you through the risks, or at the very least, you want to be able to reward a real person with your flow, buy their loyalty, so that in future they will help you with new, nascent risks, that you might not be aware of (the salesman-PM bond). Fintech in too many cases assumes that transactions are simply a dry exchange. Where it fails every time is in acknowledging the rich set of emotions that accompany any transaction beyond a certain threshold size, and which only another human can understand/acknowledge/address. I have not been surprised, because of the above, about how many fintech companies are failing.