Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company

This is an abbreviated version of a presentation I gave live at the a16z Summit in November 2019. You can watch a video version on YouTube. Download the slide deck here.

In the not-too-distant future, I believe nearly every company will derive a significant portion of its revenue from financial services. In this post, I’ll delve into the infrastructure that’s enabling this transformation and, more importantly, how that’s going to fundamentally change banking as we know it. Every company, even those that have nothing to do with financial services, will have the opportunity to benefit from fintech for the first time.  

Startups will be able to launch companies faster and more cheaply. Existing financial services institutions will be able to introduce new products quickly—and spend less on IT maintenance. And most importantly, this means more choices, better products, and lower prices for consumers.

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Technology, innovation, and the future, as told by those building it.

First, let’s take a brief look at the state of the banking industry today. A survey by the World Economic Forum found that just 28 percent of the millennial and Gen Z generations trust their banks to be fair and honest. That is a far cry from providing delightful products.

Meanwhile, the more than 50 percent of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck often experience an entirely different financial services system. Though they’re likely to need financial services more, they have fewer options, and those offerings are much more expensive. Collectively, the majority of us definitely don’t love our banks.

Why has the status quo persisted for so long, despite extreme levels of customer dissatisfaction? While innovation in any industry is hard, innovation in financial services is particularly difficult. Many of these existing institutions have been around for more than 100 years and have a large brick and mortar retail footprint. As a result, it’s hard to cut costs and roll out new products quickly—think about the many long-term leases and thousands of employees that need to be trained across the country. 

While many of these institutions may have billion-dollar-plus IT budgets, at some of the larger banks, 75 percent of those dollars is spent solely on maintaining existing products. This is a highly regulated industry, with multiple regulators across state and federal. It has a very complex infrastructure. So while this is a big opportunity for startups, there are huge challenges, too.

Given all of these challenges, why am I so optimistic about the future? There’s a parallel here: It used to be really hard to start a software company. Ten to 15 years ago, your first step would be driving to a computer store. You’d buy physical servers, maybe load them into the back of a borrowed truck, then drive them back to your office and rack them in a server room. You’d buy some software licenses, write some code for a database, and hundreds of thousands of dollars—if not millions—later, you could finally start building the product that you wanted to bring to market.

If this sounds totally anachronistic, that’s because it is. Today, anybody can start a software company with a credit card and a laptop. Why? Amazon Web Services brought all of this infrastructure as a service. AWS dramatically reduced cost and complexity and unleashed thousands of experiments.

Think of a company like Airbnb. Imagine if the founders had had to go to investors and convince them to give the company millions of dollars just to build the infrastructure to prove that yes, there’s a massive market where we all want to stay in strangers’ homes. It might have turned out differently.

 The “Amazon Web Services” Era for Financial Services

This same monumental change—infrastructure “as a service”—is coming to financial services. And it’s not just one company, it’s multiple companies, because financial services infrastructure is so complex. This transformation will reduce the cost and complexity to become a financial services company, and importantly, it will unleash thousands of experiments that will pave the way for the future of banking.

We would expect this innovation to come from startups and existing financial services institutions. But a large percentage of it will come from existing companies that are adding financial services for the very first time. It’s already happening: Apple just launched a credit card.

Now, this may have been a highly anticipated move in fintech circles, but not that long ago Apple was just your computer company. Now it’s hoping you’re going to like its credit card as much as you like your iPhone. It could be easy to dismiss Apple because it’s a company that’s both flush with cash and known for launching new products. But this trend is happening more broadly.

Take Uber and Lyft. These are ride-sharing companies, right? If you’re a driver, they might also be your bank.  For Uber and Lyft, adding financial services has two benefits. The companies both spend hundreds of dollars acquiring drivers. Then they have to make up that cost through margin on rides. It’s much faster to make up that cost if they also have margin on banking services. Furthermore, if I’m a driver, I’m more likely to stay with a company that is also providing my financial services. Ultimately, if successful, Uber and Lyft might need to acquire fewer drivers, due to better retention.

This is not just a consumer phenomenon. It’s also happening in B2B. Take Shopify, for example, which provides website services for any merchant for a monthly subscription fee. Or Mindbody, a company that helps fitness studios like yoga studios manage their businesses, also for a monthly fee. Turns out both of these companies make nearly 50 percent of their revenue through financial services.

So, why is this fintech explosion happening now? The “as a service” infrastructure is coming to banking. To understand why this is such a big deal, we need to look at how complex the banking stack is today.

Ever wondered what it takes to start a bank? Here’s a simplified version of what it looks like on the consumer side. In this highly regulated industry, first you need to apply for a license, which could take years. Instead, most of the new companies are finding a sponsor bank (effectively borrowing a license). But that’s just your first required partnership.

Then you need a core system (analogous to a large database) that logs where your customers’ money is and how it is moving around. You need to integrate with a series of payment systems so customers can take money out of their accounts. To make loans, you would need to know information about your customers via the credit bureaus. There are multiple regulatory agencies that you need to comply with, likely driving more partnerships for KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti money laundering). And because we’re dealing with money, you need to guard against fraud, which requires more software. So now we’re looking at over a dozen partnerships. Even after the two years it typically takes to ink those deals, you still haven’t built the new product that you wanted to bring to market!

But what if, similar to what Amazon did to compute and storage, companies focused on each layer of this complex stack and provided that step as a service? That’s exactly what’s happening.

Banking infrastructure as a service

Let’s take a look at a few examples. To start, let’s say I want to build a simple budgeting or financial planning application. I’m not trying to rebuild the stack, I’m just trying to get data out of the stack. Sounds easy, right? Not really, when you dive into it.

First, I would need to know everything about my customers’ finances. Start with the banks. There are thousands across the US. To make things more complex, many of these banks have different core systems and, hence, different data formats. There are at least dozens of integrations I’d need to build and maintain to have even mediocre coverage. I would also need to know about my customers’ brokerage accounts, and maybe payroll. If they have student loans, that’s an entirely different set of integrations. You can easily see how I can spend all of my time building infrastructure—and I haven’t even built the great financial planning application that I wanted to bring to market.

Now, however, there’s a company like Plaid that builds and maintains all of those integrations “as a service.” Importantly, Plaid also translates the data into a usable format.

This pre-build infrastructure layer has helped accelerate companies like Earnin, which allows users to get early access early to their paycheck for money that they’ve already earned, or Blend, which is a streamlined mortgage application. Instead of faxing in months of bank statements and brokerage statements, you can simply link your bank accounts. New connections are being built, like those into student loan servicers. In the near future, we’re likely to see much-needed improvements to the student lending experience.

Here’s another example: say you have a great idea for a new consumer banking service that includes a checking account and debit card. You’d need more partnerships than I mentioned above—for example, an ATM network for cash withdrawal and, perhaps, remote check deposit. And since a lot of these systems were built in the 1960s, you’d need to write a lot of code to stitch these partnerships together.

But now we have a company like Synapse that provides all of this “as a service.” In addition to dramatically reducing time to launch, this does two things: First, it enables the entrepreneur to focus on bringing a new product to market. So, for instance, Mercury is a small business or startup bank. It focuses on ease of use and providing great cash flow visibility, which is number one reason a lot of companies go out of business. Second, Synapse allows businesses to prioritize a customer understanding and distribution strategy, rather than banking infrastructure and payments expertise.

Propel is a company that serves some of the 40 million families that are on Electronic Benefits (e.g., food stamps). One of the company’s founders grew up on food stamps and had deep insights into this market. Propel started by offering budgeting services and is now layering on financial services.

Combating fraud and money laundering with fintech

Many industries are regulated—typically, if you don’t comply, you’ll get fined. But if you don’t comply with regulation in the financial services industry, you’ll go to jail. (Anyone who’s seen Ozark on Netflix knows the lengths criminals go to move illegal money, for instance, from the drug trade into the legal system.)

Banks are required to comply with a set of laws that’s intended to prevent money laundering. They monitor hundreds of sanctions and terrorists lists around the world——as well as all of our transactions. As you might imagine, this results in many false positives (legitimate customers getting blocked), as well as a ton of manual reviews. It’s a cumbersome process: At one of the large banks, 30,000 of 210,000 employees work solely in compliance. The vast majority of those workers are assessing suspicious activity and filing suspicious activity reports as a result of anti- money laundering regulations.

More surprising, then, is the fact that less than 3 percent of that laundered money is actually caught. This presents a big opportunity for technology to provide this function as a service. Comply Advantage, for example, does all of these sanction/terrorist watch list integrations for companies, whittling hundreds of integrations down to one. It provides more granular risk controls, so banks can spend less time monitoring transactions and more time focusing on detecting money laundering. This yields a better customer experience, lower costs, and, over time, hopefully a higher success rate. One of the big challenges in this market is that once a bank gets good at catching money launderers, the perpetrators often move to a weaker point in the system.

This is also the case with fraudsters. Many of us think of fraud as stolen identities, but there’s actually a much more pernicious type of fraud: completely fabricated or synthetic identities.

Here’s what the data scientists at a lending company discovered. While looking through the database one day, they noticed a rather obscure name linked to 13 different social security numbers. So they checked which of the name/SSN pairs had a credit profile. Turns out, all 13 of them had credit profiles! This is easier to do than you might think.

You can pick almost any nine-digit number that doesn’t start with nine at random and it could be a legitimate social security number. Say you then go apply for a loan. The first time, the lender will ping the credit bureau who will return “No, we’ve never seen this person.” But the next time you apply for a loan, the lender will ping the credit bureau, and the credit bureau will recognize that yes, there’s been an inquiry. Chances are, you can find a lender that, for a high enough cost and a low enough dollar rate, will give you a loan. These synthetic, made-up people pay back the loan, ladder up, and borrow more and more money until they bust out.

This is a very difficult type of fraud to catch. But now we have a company like Sentilink, which does it as a service. Turns out that fake people take out loans at much different rates than real people. And if you’re focused on it, you can stop this kind of fraud much more effectively. Sentilink has been able to significantly reduce fraud across all categories, from auto to personal to small businesses. These are just a few examples of how new infrastructure companies are completely remaking the financial stack—and providing it to all of us as a service.

This is a massive opportunity in the US, but it’s an even bigger opportunity worldwide. Regulation and payment systems differ around the world. In some cases, the financial services stack is entirely different. For example, a country like Mexico, where 80 percent of payments are in cash, needs a layer that incorporates cash payments into the online system.

What’s so unique about this disruption is that, with most large industry changes, oftentimes there’s one winner and many losers. But in this case, everyone has the opportunity to participate and improve significantly. For startups, we’ve seen some of the examples of the new infrastructure companies that are being built, and there are many more opportunities. But there are even more opportunities in the thousands of experiments that are going be unleashed on top of this infrastructure.

Close to 2,000 fintech companies were launched last year alone. Existing financial institutions might finally be able to replace some of their legacy systems and spend less on maintenance. In addition, they may be able to launch new products more quickly by partnering with some of these startups.

Every company, as we saw with Uber, Lyft, Shopify, Mindbody, should be thinking about how to leverage financial services to better serve their customers, better retain their customers, and drive more margin.

Finally, the really exciting part comes to us as consumers. With new financial services companies spinning up—and some of our favorite brands launching financial services—our existing services are getting better. I believe that in the not-too-distant future, everyone, no matter their socioeconomic demographic, no matter where they live in the world, will have access to affordable financial services, and we might even love them.  

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10 Best FinTech Software Development Companies in 2021

The fintech industry is undergoing rapid transformations. The pandemic has increased the demand for mobile wallets and other fintech applications. Fintech software development is now a priority for companies in the financial industry. Whether it’s a digital wallet or online banking — fintech development services are witnessing tremendous growth.

All thanks to the pandemic — the fintech market in India is estimated to jump from $65 billion in 2019 to $140 dollars in 2023. Customers need convenience and quick service delivery. Fintech app development companies enabled financial players to serve consumers by reaching them through their digital devices.

With this, the demand for fintech software companies in India has also multiplied. Today there are hundreds of fintech software development companies. However, using the right one can be challenging. How do you identify which one is best for you?

This article comprises a list of the top 10 fintech software development companies in India. The goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of what the right company can do for your business. It will help you in deciding which fintech software development company is suitable for your requirement.

How To Use Python for Fintech Applications

Top 10 Fintech Software Companies in India

1. BoTree Technologies
   A leading fintech software development company, Botree Technologies, is widely recognized in India and the US. The company provides complete FinTech solutions to startups and Enterprises. It has 8+ years of experience in building custom FinTech solutions and software. BoTree’s recent projects include Appruv, a loan management platform, and InspectDate, another loan inspection platform. It has a team of 70+ developers who have served clients in 10+ countries. As one of the top FinTech software companies, BoTree works with Python, Ruby On Rails, Django, Laravel, and other new-age technologies.
2. Fingent
   Known to drive digital transformation in the financial sector, Fingent is a trusted FinTech software development services provider. The company has 15 plus years of experience in implementing financial solutions. Its experts work with the latest trends and technologies to keep you ahead of the competition. The company works with technology like Robotics, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Predictive Analytics to build digital finance solutions. It also provides cybercrime security for secure fintech applications. The company has served hundreds of clients in 14+ countries.
3. Valuecoders
   With a team of 450+ people and 15+ years of experience, ValueCoders is one of the leading fintech companies in India. It provides custom fintech development services including payment gateways, digital wallets, bank portals, Robo Advisors, and much more. The company focuses on data security to ensure high-quality FinTech applications for its clients. ValueCoders works with technologies like Python, Java, IoT, Blockchain, JavaScript, and Big data. It is known for serving more than 2500 global brands across different domains.
4. Intellectsoft
   According to Clutch, Intellectsoft is a top company for fintech app development, India. It has 13+ years of experience in building custom web and mobile solutions in different industries. The company has served Fortune500 clients and provided digital transformation in the financial industry. It uses blockchain and advanced technology to build fintech solutions like digital wallets, payment gateways, trading applications, investment solutions, and secure FinTech software. When you look for a FinTech software company, India, Intellectsoft appears as the top name in the list. It has received various awards and recognitions from GoodFirms, TopDevelopers, and ITFirms.
5. Netguru
   One of the leading fintech app development companies, Netguru provides seamless fintech solutions to startups and enterprises. It is the best choice for banks, insurers, and financial companies that want to start their digital journey. The company has successfully delivered 900+ projects with 700+ people on board. It has 12+ years of experience in building custom software products. The company provides digital banking applications, financial process automation, online payment wallets, customer loyalty programs, and insurance-based fintech applications.
6. Merixstudio
   As one of the top fintech software companies, Merixstudio has 120+ FinTech software experts. They create custom FinTech solutions for banking and financial institutions. The company is known to create sophisticated FinTech products for clients across the world some of its clients are Toshiba. Fox, and more. In 2019, Merixstudio was recognized as one of the top FinTech software development companies. It uses the collaborative power of software development to build advanced FinTech solutions. The company has experience in building FinTech software for clients in 10+ countries.
7. Sidebench
   Another company for fintech app development, India, Sidebenchis known for its digital strategy and consulting in the FinTech industry. The company has 8+ years of experience and houses 249+ employees. According to clutch, it is one of the top FinTech companies that provide software in 2021. It provides modern FinTech solutions and comprehensive financial outsourcing. The company serves some of the biggest known brands in the world, including Microsoft and Instagram. It is also one of the top 10 app development companies for startups.
8. Fortunesoft
   An emerging company of FinTech developers, India, Fortunesoft is becoming a popular name in the digital transformation of financial services. The company is known to provide top-notch FinTech solutions for P2P lending platforms, crowdfunding platforms, digital wallets, and wealth management platforms. It provides highly secure and reliable financial software services. The company has 10+ years of experience and it has successfully delivered 483 + projects across the globe. It uses PHP, Python, Node JS, Ruby On Rails, Django, and Angular in its technology stack for modern-day finTech applications.
9. The Sneakers Agency
   One of the top company for fintech development services, The Sneakers Agency is a full-service fintech software company. It has 200+ employees and is a trusted partner for 50+ startups and global brands. It provides FinTech software services for UX/UI design, custom web solutions, DevOps consulting, CRM, and other digital products. It has developed payment gateways, digital wallets, investment management platforms, and many other products to serve the financial service sector. The Sneakers Agency delivers unique and exceptional FinTech digital experiences for the web and mobile devices.
10. Itexus
    With 8+ years of experience and serving 220 + successful projects to 180 + clients, Itexus has complete backend, frontend, and full-stack development expertise. The company is one of the top 10 Tech app development companies in India with 90+ in-house professionals. It provides solutions like digital wallets, payment gateway, digital lending systems, and other software for the banking and financial industry. The company uses Machine Learning and natural language processing for building advanced FinTech solutions. It also provides assistance and predictive analytics tools for stock exchanges and trading.

Conclusion: Hire the Top FinTech Software Company in India

The above is a small list of the top FinTech companies in India. These companies have a global client base and have years of experience in building custom FinTech solutions.

BoTree Technologies is a leading custom software development company that provides complete IT consulting services and development in the fintech industry.

Contact us today for a free consultation.

Source: https://botreetechnologies.medium.com/top-10-fintech-software-development-companies-2021-de3170dc1607

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Top 10 FinTech Software Development Companies In 2021

Looking for the top fintech software development company? Explore some best fintech software companies already reviewed by GoodFirms, Clutch, best clients etc." />

Read More - https://www.valuecoders.com/blog/technology-and-apps/top-10-fintech-software-development-companies-2020/

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Top 10 FinTech Software Development Companies 2021 (Updated List) - Valuecoders

Fintech technology has brought innovations in the Fintech Software industry, which includes the ever-expanding integrations between finance and digital technology. These integrations mainly seek to automate and improve the use and provision of services to fintech software companies and consumers.

Previously, Fintech services were limited only to laptops and desktops, but now they are also increasing on smartphones. In the United States, 64.0% of millennials and 59.0% of Gen Xers are using a banking application on their smartphones.

The Fintech landscape has a wide range of applications that are diverse and growing with technical advancements in areas including insurance technology, Blockchain, digital banks, and lending platforms.

Different types of Fintech software available in the market in 2020 are listed below:

-> Insurance (InsurTech)

-> Cryptocurrency and Blockchain

-> Payments Gateways (for financial software development company)

-> Regulatory (RegTech) (for financial software development company)

-> Peer-to-Peer lending/Crowdfunding

https://www.valuecoders.com/blog/technology-and-apps/top-10-fintech-software-development-companies-2020/

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Fintech Development Trends You Should know in 2021

Fintech is one of the fastest-growing technologies in the world. With every passing day, this technology is expanding to a new level and making a benchmark. With the help of Fintech, you can easily encounter different problems related to payments, money, and banks.

According to Statista, In 2018, about 61 percent of Americans used digital banking, which is set to rise to 65.3 percent by 2022.

Banks and other financial institutions are developing customer-centric models that give an overall better banking experience for everyone, and they are taking help from Fintech to get the job done. There is a lot more to come in the Fintech industry to solve the financial issues with modern trends and development in Fintech.

In the coronavirus outbreak, the Fintech app development industry has evolved much and helped transaction money with any contact and overwhelmed support from banks and financial institutions. It seems like the support provided to Fintech will last longer, and with development trends, Fintech will become smarter, quicker, and convenient.

Read Full blog - https://rewardbloggers.com/blog/post/24486/fintech-development-trends-you-should-know-in-2021

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FinTech Software Development Company | FinTech App Solution

Looking for a FinTech software development company? We create custom FinTech app solution(Banking / Financial) 16 years| 4200+ projects| 97% Client retention

Website :- https://bit.ly/30A8Ie9

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