A VC once told me that fear was the best sales tool ever invented. That was in reference to the hockey stick growth his cybersecurity startup was seeing, thanks to a raft of stories in the media regarding high profile cases of companies being hacked. But might the same be said of banks and the pending threat of fintech? Arguably, they have much to fear.
From having some of the most lucrative and low-hanging parts of their business unbundled by upstarts, such as TransferWise (money transfer), Nutmeg (savings), and PensionBee (pensions), to out right ‘challenger’ banks that are re-inventing the current account and will lend out customer deposits in the form of overdrafts, a business model at the core of traditional banking.
And then there is the biggest elephant in the room: big tech companies. If fintech is really about monetising access to a consumer’s financial data — access that the banks are being forced to provide by upcoming EU and U.K. open banking regulation — the likes of Google, Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, Apple and Amazon, can’t afford not to jump onboard the fintech train.
Enter Meniga, a London-headquartered fintech startup, with R&D in Iceland, that provides digital banking technology to some of the world’s largest banks. Its various products include a software layer that bridges the gap between a bank’s legacy tech infrastructure and a modern API, making it easier to build consumer-friendly digital banking experiences on top and to comply with upcoming regulation such as PSD2.
Those new digital banking experiences typically show up in a bank’s mobile app and include things like personal finance manager functionality, a Facebook-esque activity feed to help customers keep track of their spending, or the new Fitbit-inspired…