How traditional banks failed the consumer

One thing technology has always enabled is accessibility, from communications, and manufacturing to information. It’s always here to make living easier, and it’s constantly evolving to meet different needs depending on what humanity’s on at the moment. Since its beginnings, when all we needed was better connections between cities, then countries and continents, and so on.

But the world’s needs became much more complicated as years went by, and especially, as the world’s social structures became more complex. Now, our needs aren’t as simple and universal as “I need to get to another city in less time”, but now, as we’ve talked about many times before, each segment of consumers has its own priorities to fulfill. This has become a problem for bureaucratic organizations, such as banks and financial institutions.

So first let’s talk about the solution: digital financial services. The fintech market has grown exponentially in the last years and it seems like it won’t stop anytime soon, it’s actually expected that funding grows at a CAGR of 37.6% from 2022 to 2027. But what’s the whole fuss with fintechs?

They considered a huge unattended population: every person in the world that doesn’t have access to traditional banks for any reason. And you can guess that’s a lot of people, from migrants to young people to marginalized populations and the list goes on. When thinking about the whole situation you just realize how its massive growth makes sense.

Now, traditional banks are starting to compete with fintechs by launching multiple digital products, but what they don’t realize is that in this case, accessibility isn’t about having money on your phone (although it is a tiny part of the solution) but mostly, when we talk accessibility, it’s about being able to access a financial service without much paperwork or bureaucracy. Because yes, for most people in this world, it is a barrier.

All this said I can’t help but wonder what is going to be the next big thing for tech? I just hope that traditional organizations learned the lesson, and embrace change as we find new unattended populations that need technology to make their lives better.