Tag: Fintech
A couple of days ago, Plaid, a fast growing FinTech company that lets users connect their bank accounts to a variety of financial services, announced that it was being acquired by Visa for $5.3B.
The first thought that came to my mind is that I wished Plaid would have rather been acquired by a large blockchain company, like Coinbase. The only issue is that $5.3 Billion is a hefty price for even the largest of blockchain companies, whereas it’s only a digestible bite for a behemoth like Visa.
Many analysts referred to Plaid as “FinTech plumbing”. For me, Plaid symbolized more than plumbing. It was an essential on-ramp/off-ramp component that enabled consumers to loosen their reliance on banks. I have previously written about and continue to believe that FinTech, DeFi, and blockchain-based financial services are allowing us to gradually depend less and less on large banks as our primary financial services providers. In Banks as Back-ends: The Decentralization Has Started (January 2016), I gave examples of that trend, asserting that the decentralization of banking is already here, but it hasn’t been evenly distributed yet.
I became aware of Plaid in the past years as it is used by some cryptocurrency wallet providers to provide an essential on-ramp to bank accounts. Basically, Plaid users connect their bank account to participate in off-banks personal finance, payments, lending, brokerage, wealth management, and a plethora of ancillary financing services. Plaid’s metrics were impressive: they signed-up 11,500 banks/credit unions and touched more than 20 million consumers via popular apps like Venmo, Robinhood, Betterment and 2,500 others.
Of course, FinTech broadly is a big culprit in this unstoppable finance decentralization trend, but I had wished that the companies leading this trend (such as Plaid) would not be swallowed by incumbents.
I don’t know the Plaid team, and I congratulate them on this amazing exit. At the same time, I’m a little apprehensive because we all know too well how these types of acquisitions typically end. Will Plaid services continue to flourish as before providing more freedom to consumers, or will that service become eventually suffocated and dictated by what’s important for Visa before what’s important for decentralized finance?
When big companies think of innovation, it doesn’t mean the same as when startups do. Big companies are restrained and chained by their current business models, and everything gravitates towards, and aligns behind their existing strategies and direction. This means that innovation will be boxed-in instead of flying according to its own path.
Just imagine for a moment how different the significance of this acquisition might have been if Coinbase had acquired Plaid, and not Visa.
I see this acquisition as another successful FinTech company that was supposed to give users freedom from big banks, yet it is brought back under the claws of big Fin.
While in Amsterdam at the Steemfest, as we were finishing dinner, I’m not sure how the conversation with the waitress veered into the subject of cheques, when she mentioned they haven’t been using cheques in Holland for a long time. I didn’t know that, and “checked” into it. It turned out that cheques were no longer used in the Netherlands since 2007. Actually, the same had happened in all Scandinavian countries, plus Austria, Germany, Poland and Belgium, in favor of electronic transfers and direct bank transfers.
After more research, I found out that Europe had an (oldish) system called Giro for handling electronic transfers and bill payments, and apparently even that system is getting phased out. Actually, electronic payments across the European Union are now fast and inexpensive—usually free for consumers. [Ref]
This prompted me to wonder why are we still using cheques in North America (and in many parts of the rest of the world), in a day and age of increasing electronification of everything. Recently, I had to deposit a US cheque and the standard banking holding period in Canada was 15 days. I didn’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque, except that last week, I had to pay a washing machine repairman via a cheque, as that was the only method offered.
Payment systems and rituals are highly influenced and shaped by national regulators, central banks and clearinghouses. In the United States, the Automated Clearing House (ACH), regulated by NACHA and the Federal Reserve Bank, handles all interbank transfers, including direct deposit and direct debit. In Canada, cheque sizes and types are overseen by the Canadian Payments Association (CPA), now renamed as Payments Canada.
Every country in the world has their own payment regulation entity that dictates how banks, financial institutions and businesses can handle payments. Consumers are the consequential recipients of the practices being imposed, but don’t generally have a say in influencing the direction of payment methods. Instead, progressive consumers have turned to alternative methods of payments and money transfers, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, Venmo, TransferWise, Xoom, Western Union, Square Cash or others. Millennials especially are a big segment of users that love these systems. Most millennials did not touch cheques, just as many of them skipped telephone landlines in favor of cell phones, and many are now opting for mobile banking above anything.
Regulators try to innovate, proposing changes and announcing modernization efforts, including blockchain experiments. For example, The Federal Reserve System’s Faster Payments Task Force has a mission is to identify and assess alternative approaches for implementing safe, ubiquitous, faster payments capabilities in the United States. Payments Canada has an initiative to modernize Canada’s core payment clearing and settlement infrastructure, and is seeking nominees for its Stakeholder Advisory Council. Both organizations have announced interest in, or initial work with blockchains.
But it seems that all these so-called innovative gestures are focused on backend, mid-office processes or around business-to-business transactions. This means that consumers (who care more about front-end experiences) may not necessarily see a big change that soon. Why do we still think along the archaic terms of “clearing and settlement”? Why can’t these two steps always be collapsed into one? Of course, some countries have much faster internal settlement cycles than others, but it seems that moving the world to real-time settlements is still a slow process with only 18 countries already having real-time payments systems in place and 12 others building or exploring them, as of 2005. With SWIFT in the middle, and existing standards like the Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), it is apparent that the world runs on an intricately complicated and proprietary hybrid set of systems that can barely catch-up with each others, making the whole as bad as its weakest link.
We need to ask – if the world’s payment system were to be re-invented today, what would it look like?
In my opinion, you would find a good dose of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency wallets elements, low transaction costs, low fees, in addition to an emphasis on mobile experiences, instant settlements, and a lot more peer-to-peer transactions that are easy to initiate (e.g. paying a tradesman instantly). In this new world, the banks and regulators wouldn’t be gatekeepers, but rather a node on the fast infrastructure network. In this scenario, banks (or institutions that are account holders) would be bypassed if they are slow, and regulators would be the recipients of automatic reporting, in essence giving them the visibility they want in order to enforce compliance.
I can’t wait to see a fully electronic world of money and value transfers with instant clearing and settlements, and user experiences that users really want. Settling via blockchain technology is already showing us that it is a lot more efficient than settling via a patchwork of high latency proprietary database integrations.
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