Fintech vs Banks: Who owns the future?

Nottingham University Business School’s most recent Business Leaders Series event featured Maurice Benisty, Chief Commercial Officer of Demica Ltd.

A Nottingham law graduate, Maurice’s 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. He joined boutique capital markets firm Demica in October 2017.

Maurice gave an entertaining and insightful talk to students, business visitors, and faculty about the current state of banking, an industry that has “suffered from its misdeeds” and is focused on remedying past wrongs. 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. Banking incumbents, 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.

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. As Maurice put it, “A closed provider is the past and banks have to decide what they want to be.”

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.

More about the Business Leaders Series