Why would you invest in fintech?

Why would you invest in fintech?

Grant Halverson, chief executive of McLean Roche Consulting and a former financial services multinational CEO and financial technology CEO writes in ANZ's Blue Notes Blog

It’s now nine years since ‘fintech’, the buzz term for financial technology start-ups, entered the lexicon and threatened to upend banking as we know it. It hasn’t yet. But will it?

As it stands today, fintech to date is not innovative or transformative enough and investment dollars are not sufficient to build a world-leading financial-services breakthrough.

Halverson goes on to review in some detail the market, major investment phases, unicorns, IPOs and investment volume.

Australia is a late starter in fintech with initial momentum only starting in 2014. The market here runs the risk of ramping up investment just as the rest of the world is deflating.

Previous aggressive, trend-oriented acquisitions by banks, including monoline mortgage and credit card companies in the 90s and mobile-wallet companies in early 2000s, all ended with faded dreams for all parties. As an investor and participant in the VC sector, my view is fintech in its current state could well repeat this experience.

There are of course the exceptions.

In just a few days, one such fintech company will launch in the foreign exchange transfer space, providing an alternative to the existing opaque, siloed and inefficient banking networks with a common global infrastructure that brings new efficiencies to financial remittances by enabling near real-time settlements, improving visibility and reducing risk.
The technology tightly integrates payments messaging with funds settlements, allowing for unprecedented visibility and performance.

Flash Payments, a cutting edge fin-tech startup based in Sydney Australia, is engineered from the ground up to deliver intelligent foreign exchange transfer services, without hidden fees.

Using the innovative Ripple technology platform and XRP, Ripple's digital currency, Flash Payments delivers extraordinary transparency, speed and transactional control to users.

Flash Payments puts their customers in control. They can choose a target conversion rate, automate the international money transfer and track their currency transfer, like a package, from start to finish.

Flash Payments provides a lean high-performance foreign exchange transfer payment services that safely, efficiently and reliably provides users with a better customer experience.

Learn more about Flash Payments and sign up to benefit from their cutting-edge technology, great rates, transparency and control.