Fintechs should sell financial health, not financial services

New technology for a new financial sector

In the UK, last year’s report on “Consumer Priorities for Open Banking” by Faith Reynolds and Mark Chidley (which is, by the way, an excellent piece of work and well worth reading) set out just why it is that open banking by itself delivers quite limited benefits for consumers. They point towards a future of open finance (and, indeed, open everything else as well) and talk about an industry that uses the new technologies of artificial intelligence, APIs, digital identity and so on to take a more complete view of a customer’s situation and provide services that increase the overall financial health of that customer. I thought this was a very interesting way of creating a narrative for the next-generation of fintech and techfin propositions.

Fintechs should stop providing financial services and start providing financial health. This may seem to be just another buzzword for embedded finance strategists, but I think it is more than that. It’s a way of thinking about the next generation financial sector.

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