Banks were beginning to describe themselves as technology companies with banking licences. The phrase captured an ambition, but it also exposed the harder question: whether institutions built around control could adopt the operating logic of technology companies.
FinTech 1.0 and disruption forced banks to take notice. FinTech 2.0 was increasingly about letting banks participate and giving them a stake in the ecosystem.
During the first phase, many banks responded with what looked like knee-jerk technology decisions. The question was whether the next phase would produce a more coherent strategy.
Banks as “technology companies with a banking license”?
A number of bank executives had begun describing their institutions as technology companies with banking licences. There was an obvious logic to the idea: banks employ large numbers of developers and technology increasingly determines the customer experience.
But the analogy has limits. Banks do not simply need more technology. They need to understand how technology changes their relationship with customers, data, infrastructure and the wider financial ecosystem.
As I saw it, banks should focus first on capturing and analysing customer transactions through mobile channels and then use that understanding to build a genuinely digital relationship.
Calling a bank a technology company is easy. Rebuilding the institution so that technology changes how it operates is much harder.KEVIN MOSERI · EARLIER WORK
The C-word: collaboration
FinTech 2.0 was less about disruption for its own sake and more about collaboration. If banks insist on becoming technology companies, they also need an ecosystem strategy.
My answer was no: banks still need to be banks. They need technology to survive and grow, but their competitive role is not necessarily to imitate Silicon Valley.
Customers do not necessarily want a “bank”. They want the things a bank makes possible: managing money, accessing money and paying for things, ideally with less friction.
That distinction matters. If the customer’s objective is to buy, save, borrow, transfer or manage money more easily, then banking itself becomes the underlying infrastructure rather than the product the customer wants to think about.
That, in my view, is the deeper opportunity created by FinTech.