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The traditional banking system is about 150 years old by now. Increasingly, it seems to serve a smaller segment of society, regardless of its half-hearted attem
by anongraddebt 7y ago
The traditional banking system is about 150 years old by now. Increasingly, it seems to serve a smaller segment of society, regardless of its half-hearted attempts at innovation.
I have a number of friends working in finance. Lovely people. Absolutely arrogant, though, when it comes to the question of whether their industry will face non-trivial disuption.
Maybe Google and other current tech giants will not be the ones, but someone is going to come along, take a chunk out of financial services, and start the ball rolling on a non-trivial amount of disruption in that space.
I often see people questioning why others would want a new finance/banking system. Yes, the traditional one has some negatives, but how could you want something almost completely new?
I think this line of questioning misses the phenomenon underway. The banking system works for well for me, so it can seem counterintuitive to see people pushing for quite major changes. But, clearly enough people are fed up that things are starting to move in that direction. At what point do I just say, "does it matter whether these people can provide a litany of reasons?"
Either traditional players sack up and satisfy current and potential customers, or someone else will.
- Aloha 7y agoBranch banking as we know it was effectively invented by AP Giannini in the 1920's - arguably modern banking didn't exist till the computer and ATM networks arrived in the 1970's.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI'm pretty sure that whoever disrupts banking will do it the Uber way, by disregarding all the laws that they are required to follow and trying to claim not to be what they actually are, with the same eventual success this route has had for Uber.
- joosters 7y agoUber is succeeding? Its finances don't think so.
- satanspastaroll 7y agoIt's really amazing how a company can run for so long on so much loss. IIRC Twitter has never turned a profit either, and yet there it stands
- rco8786 7y agoTwitter has made profit now. But didn’t for a while. I worked there until 2015 and the consensus was that they had enough money to continue operating at the then current loss levels for like 50 years. It’s hard to visualize how much money these big tech cos are actually taking in investment. If you have a $B you can lose $10mm a year for one hundred years.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIn English if you say "their lack of morality will lead them to have the eventual success of Al Capone" one is generally assumed to mean that the person under discussion will end up in Federal Prison, although also with the chance of running a highly lucrative criminal enterprise first.
- oarsinsync 7y agoFinancial crime is something that is heavily enforced on an (inter)national scale. Local transportation violations aren't enforced in quite the same way.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y agoYeah, but it's generally enforced by freezing your funds until you show up in court. If you've come up with an alternative, maybe just leave out the government-facing API that lets them freeze funds.
- dflock 7y agoThis will just mean that they get to write their "amazing journey" post from prison.
- imtringued 7y agoThis is now how the banking sector works. Most of the newcomers like N26 and Revolut are pretty much just an average bank with modern technology. The reality however is that they don't have a sustainable business model. They offer bank accounts for free and keep bleeding cash because no one wants their premium accounts, presumably because people don't use them as their primary bank account and just as a middle man for easy access to Google or Apple Pay.
- jrochkind1 7y ago> Increasingly, it seems to serve a smaller segment of society, I am not certain that it serves a smaller segment of society than ever, I suspect it's always served a small segment of society. Would want to see some data.
- nradov 7y agoNo one can disrupt the traditional banking system without getting enabling federal legislation passed first. This isn't an industry where startups can just disregard the laws. The government literally seizes assets and puts violators in prison. So your friends are right, for now.