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FF Virtual Arena: Partnerships: Fintech’s Secret Sauce
Partnerships have become the cornerstone of modern fintech success. Whether it be incumbent banks collaborating with early-moving underdogs, or fintechs joining forces with each other, the industry is fast learning that the only way to innovate is together.
In this Virtual Arena, we welcome Richard Stockley, the Director of Partnerships at Currencycloud, and Daniel Cronin, the Co-Founder of Integrated Finance, both infrastructure builders in the world of fintech. We discuss the modularisation of fintech product offerings and how this has led to the need for collaborations between those fintechs, banks, and tech companies who strive ever further toward bundled product offerings.
“What we have seen in the last couple of years is that fintechs are becoming better at fewer things,” said Stockley. “There is a trend to go narrow and deep, being all things to all men is a difficult task and as different organisations specialise in different areas, they realise they don’t want the whole solution but just a piece of it. So collaboration with those adjacent parts, for their clients to consume a seamless solution for their customers and provide services, is essential.”
Only in the last five years have fintechs started to hyperfocus on specific capabilities like KYC, AML, and account issuing – this has led to the blossoming of companies who facilitate these integrations between solution builders and service providers, to bring a consolidated product to market.
“There is an industry-agnostic graveyard of failed partnerships, ” explained Cronin. “What I’ve found is that partnerships work better from the ground up rather than top-down because it builds organic value that way. For example, if a sales guide at Integrated finance is contributing to a deal and they know that there are other components that the entrepreneur or founder needs to deliver this product, that person is incentivised to find those solutions for them, and whom they can go to help with the client’s problem because they can’t do them by themselves. Through trial and error, you build organic relationships that way.”
This approach of companies having the space to perfect their offerings and then integrate them with other services results in a much more comprehensive product for customers. We still have a long way to go for banks to fully cooperate and integrate their services into one singular channel, but starting from the ground up with BaaS solutions and fintechs is slowly producing a knock-on effect in the industry for faster and all-encompassing banking services for consumers.
This Virtual Arena is a companion piece to Currencycloud’s latest report.
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