Maurice Benisty - alumi - shares his insights
University of Nottingham alumni, Maurice Benisty, shared his insights into the current state of banking as part of the School’s Business Leaders Series of public events.
Maurice is Chief Commercial Officer of boutique capital markets firm Demica Ltd. His career spans 25 years, from investment banking with Lehman Brothers, Bankers Trust and Paribas, Chief Commercial Officer of GE Capital International, to CEO, Wells Fargo Commercial Distribution Finance.
Maurice gave a shrewd and entertaining talk to students, business visitors, and faculty members about the current state of banking, an industry that, as he said, has “suffered from its misdeeds” and is focused on remedying past wrongs. He pointed out that financial technology firms, in contrast, are motivated by huge opportunities ahead and aren’t encumbered by the high levels of regulation imposed on banks.
Discussing the banking crisis in its social and political context, he described how poor banking practices and bad user experience have led to a huge fall in levels of public trust in financial services.
The pace of change in fintech
Banking institutions, with some exceptions, find it very hard to embrace the level of change and innovation happening in fintech platforms, which are not weighed down by legacy systems. Maurice predicted that banks will become vaults, while competition - for example in lending to SMEs - drives innovation and creates a void to be filled by fintech platforms.
The pace of development and thinking in fintech and data in the cloud has changed the balance of power away from regulators towards the customer. A closed provider is the past and banks have to decide what they want to be.
