Fintech

Who Needs a New Financial Services Taxonomy?

Our age is increasingly dominated by the dual challenges and opportunities of the sustainability transition on the one hand, and digital transformation on the other. We witness emerging new financial domains with novel names such as Fintech , or TechFin, or various combinations and hues of Green and Sustainable in Sustainable Finance and we see forces that are reshaping the direction of travel for the financial industry.

Lehman, Brexit, De-Regulation and the future of EU fintech

The decision by the citizens of the United Kingdom to vote against continuing membership of the European Union (#brexit) will have wide ranging repercussions on many facets of the European (and even global) economic system. As of early 2017, we see this trend further reinforced by a new US administration that aims to revisit a wide range of policy choices, including aspects of financial services regulation. While the aftershocks of these events still reverberate, it seems that we can posit quite confidently that:

How much digital bank can we fit in a 50 euro bill?

Much has been said about the impact of Big Data and high-end GPU Computing on the provision of digital financial services. At Open Risk we wanted to explore the boundary of what is possible at the diametrically opposite end of the cost spectrum:

What is the_absolutely minimum_cost for providing digital financial services? . In this post we begin the journey of finding out the answer to that question and it promises to be fascinating!

Fintech Risk Events

Fintech Risk Events is an open catalog of observed and publicized operational failures of fintech business models. The catalog aims to document, in due course, such events reasonably accurately, to allow risk managers understand the (potentially new) vulnerabilities of new financial services models.

Scope

The scope of the operational risk database is Fintech companies. By that we mean newly established financial services providers that operate exclusively via new (digital) platforms and are (mostly) unregulated. The fintech sector is distinct from established financial services firms that operate with a mix of technology platforms and are (mostly) regulated.

In finance, it’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times

It is a special moment to start a career in financial services. We are walking amid the ruins of the previous financial order. Fallen banks, broken markets, negative interest rates, shell-shocked economies and discredited theoretical assumptions. We see the enormous cost and impact to the welfare of society of a less than perfect financial system which has not kept pace with the advancement of our general knowledge and technical capabilities in most other domains.

The Top Ten list of why Silicon Valley cannot Disrupt Wall Street (yet) was published first here in October 2014

Financial services jobs continue being decimated. A recent (as of the initial post date) FT article was a sobering summary of the continuing transformation of the financial sector: 2015 alone has seen more than 10% reduction of the total workforce across large EU/US banks: