Fintech

Towards a Faceted Taxonomy of Financial Services

Reading Time: 27 min.
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

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

Reading Time: 10 min.
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.
Fintech Risk Events

Fintech Risk Events

Reading Time: 1 min.
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.
Risk Management Internship on the Cusp of a New Financial Era

Risk Management Internship on the Cusp of a New Financial Era

Reading Time: 3 min.
Risk Management Internship 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.
Top 10 Reasons why Silicon Valley cannot disrupt Wall Street (yet)

Top 10 Reasons why Silicon Valley cannot disrupt Wall Street (yet)

Reading Time: 8 min.
Top 10 Reasons why Silicon Valley cannot disrupt Wall Street (yet) The Top Ten list of why Silicon Valley cannot Disrupt Wall Street (yet) was published first here in October 2014 Motivation The possibility, heck the inevitability, of Silicon Valley (representing more generally new technology entrants in finance) aiming to disrupt Wall Street (representing generally incumbents) is one of the fascinating memes of our times. Yet while the potential of technology to reshape financial services is not really in question, the manner and timing that this might happen are entirely different stories.
Risk Management Skills for the Fintech Era

Risk Management Skills for the Fintech Era

Reading Time: 6 min.
Risk Management Skills for the Fintech Era 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: As main drivers for this true jobs hecatomb are cited higher minimum capital requirements (that depress Return on Equity and hence require lower costs to restore it to investor acceptable levels), low interest rates that erode Profitability Margins, and a generally subdued economic landscape which reduces Volumes.