Bitter truth is that innovation in core parts of the economy can make the economy unstable. Innovation implies risk and risk can materialize once in a while. So we allow innovation to happen on the fringes of the economy. Fringe enough that if we loose it, not many people would notice.
Back to FinTech or Innovation in financial services. In the U.S/EU FinTech is helping evolve micro-lending and online banking industries. The pace is much more rapid in the developing parts of the world though, like Africa. However, we may be surprised to hear that U.S is a laggard when it comes to financial innovation. The reason is not that innovators in the U.S are not smart enough - but they simply focus on other important problems like talking robots, space travel and auto driving cars.
So what is going on with FinTech that should worry us? Here is a news flash - China is fast becoming the new FinTech capital of the world, taking that title away from the western world. The transactions volumes processed by Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba are growing so fast that they are set to pass the volumes Visa and Mastercard process in Europe and US in 2017. China's mobile payment system is does not use any high-technology though. It uses bar codes to process payments! Thats way inferior and insecure than the system used by Mastercard and Visa (EMVCO) or by Google/Applepay. One thing it gets right though - its fast, convenient and cheap and thats what matters. It has connected about a billion people in China who never had any bank accounts or credit history before. So why should we be worried? Chinese companies are slowly importing this system into U.S and EU through partnerships and deals with processors like Stripe and companies like AirBnB etc. They are so big and powerful that U.S companies have little choice accommodating them. That would slowly cut into the western financial system and would cause a huge disruption in the economies in the next ten years.
What can we learn from the success of the Chinese system? First, it processes transactions without communicating with the banks each time. If the amount of the transaction has a limit and the replication is fast enough, this should work. The result is that this makes it very fast for high volume processing. It is cheap and convenient because there is no need to have expensive NFC hardware or scanning devices or chips/cards. Compare that with the our system - there are two banks involved. We use a dedicated transmission network for the payments and there are middlemen involved. More middlemen mean more fees and commissions including the need to keep reconciling data as it passes all the intermediate systems. Chip cards make things even slower. Evolution in our system is not going to be easy since the credit card companies have a tight grip on end users with rewards and points systems.
What can save us from certain failure is the need for innovation - the U.S still has around 50 million people without bank accounts and thus no credit cards. PayNearMe tapped into this market by offering an easy way to make cash based payments where credit cards were not an option. So who is going to get to it first!
What can save us from certain failure is the need for innovation - the U.S still has around 50 million people without bank accounts and thus no credit cards. PayNearMe tapped into this market by offering an easy way to make cash based payments where credit cards were not an option. So who is going to get to it first!
