The banking landscape of tomorrow
Blog written by Chris Herd, CEO and founder at Nexves
Today, fintech companies are innovating around existing products and services to create a better customer experience, tomorrow they will need to do far more. The first wave of challenger banks has amassed huge user numbers by doing little more than providing a more functional user interface, the next leap forward will come from enabling things which were previously impossible.
The future we imagine is akin to a Netflix of Financial services. Fintechs are on the brink of offering consumers a personalised menu of products instead of one-size-fits-all services.
As innovators and disruptors, we have a window of opportunity afforded to us by a unique confluence of circumstances.
The unlocked door to previously inaccessible data endows customers with the chance to receive insights into their spending habits which could save them a fortune.
The need to focus on the long term
Ultimately if companies like us do our job properly we’ll end up with a win-win situation. The value to the customers will be as a direct result of our ability to deliver simple products which people use and understand. The more money we keep in our users’ pockets, the higher they will value our services, the more they will trust us to deliver services which are of greater financial benefit. That won’t be achieved over night.
At Nexves, there are a number of key innovations that enable us to achieve things that no other company in the world can match. Mostly, this is through our ability to acquire a level of data which is exponentially more granular than our nearest competitors — enriching our intelligence and insights to an extent which was previously unimaginable.
How the world is changing
It is always essential to abreast of forthcoming technological developments and trends. They influence people and revolutionise the way we deal with finances.
Our 2018 reading list: https://hackernoon.com/a-cryptopunk-startup-founders-2018-reading-list-a52c7fb6bc0a]
- The internet as it currently exists will capitulate. The revenue model of advertising only will give way to a distributed model of digital taxation. This will take the form of metered-micropayments for all products, services or content you consume online — compensating creators equal to your engagement. Where industries have died, digital tokens will enable those things which acquire most attention to thrive. Cryptocurrency has been fascinating but we are currently in the replication phase — where people are trying to reinvent what currently exists — instead of doing things with blockchain and cryptocurrency which were previously impossible. We hope to imagine then deliver the latter.
- Peer to peer has been awesome for platform creators but terrible for gig economy workers. As Ubers Valuation has skyrocketed into the hundreds of Billions, rewards for drivers have plummeted. In short, the compensation for providing the service and maintaining the platforms are misaligned. This will change. Service providers will be rewarded with equity in the underlying business through new fractional ownership models. Every trip will equate to a higher stake of ownership. Drive more? Own more.
- Last mile delivery is about to explode. It’s relatively cheap to get a large volume of goods from one geographic location to another but It’s ridiculously expensive to get it from one place in that city to a large number of addresses. Look for there to be a number of VC backed players emerge in this space in the next 18 months. They will initially tie together D2C companies and their community, enabling those businesses to leverage the engagement of the crowd to let their customers benefit and lower delivery costs significantly. I guarantee a unicorn emerges in this domain by 2020.
- Crowdfunding is dead, long live crowdfunding. Investing in equity is prehistoric, consumer purchasing behaviour will become a new form of investing. Voting with your wallet will mean owning through your decisions. Buy something, own it, buy more, own more. Instead of purchasing stocks and shares, everyday consumers will accrue ownership of the futures most exciting companies through their existing purchasing behaviour. This means that the can of coke you are drinking would be a tiny fraction of equity in the business, equally the chocolate bar in your pocket or the soap in your bathroom. Wealth will be redistributed. Where in the past the only beneficiaries of our actions were the shareholders in the business which produced the things we consume — there will be a mass reaction against this. Technology will enable a swarm of individuals to cohesively act as one for mutual economic benefit. This will give rise to co-operatively owned brands which produce a vast number of the things we consume. People will be incentivised to act as selfishly as possible, benefitting everyone who does so as well.
New solutions needed
That is the world in which we see Nexves playing a central part. In order to participate in this cyclical economy, we need a digital passport which collects our data, protects it, lets you monetise it while enabling the payments alluded to above. We need a mechanism which enables us to hold the equity we earn through our behaviour and access markets to cash out when we desire. We layer on top of any existing bank account and will be the thing which facilitates participation
Strong opinions weakly held is the worst advice we’ve ever heard. Things that are weakly held are cheaply discarded and doing this leads to uncertainty. Instead, continuously challenging the things we believe — either destroying or improving them — is the framework we operate within. Candour is the most efficient vehicles which enable us to discover things as a startup and challenge conventionally held belief or the dogma which holds others back.
