We’ve seen enough. We’re going BIG on the death of big banking.
If you’ve ever had to spend time at a bank opening a simple checking account, or even worse—closing a bank account—you won’t be surprised to hear that Americans are abandoning traditional branch banking by the millions.
Even bank executives concede the massive shift in their business.
Deloitte reports that 3 out of 4 banking executives agree that their work is going to drastically change over the next 3-5 years due to digital business trends.
The biggest unclaimed territory in the consumer discretionary universe is cannabis. Even though cannabis remains illegal under federal law, Americans spent $6 billion in 2017 on legal recreational and medical marijuana.
Why it matters: Americans may have spent a total of $50 billion on recreational cannabis last year, according to the best estimates. That leaves enormous room for the legal market to grow, even if cannabis consumption remains flat.
Advances in artificial intelligence and automation could replace as many as half the nation’s financial services workers over the next decade, industry experts say, but it’s going to take a big investment to make that happen.
James D’Arezzo, CEO of Glendale-based Condusiv Technologies, says that’s where things are headed. And the process will be complicated.
“Unless banks deal with the performance issues that AI will cause for ultra-large databases, they will not be able to take the money gained by eliminating positions and spend it on the new services and products they will need in order to stay competitive,” he said.
When blockchains first appeared nearly a decade ago as the technical backbone of Bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency, they seemed to offer the masses a way to cut out the financial middleman. But now the big banks and other industry players are finding ways to spin the new tool to their advantage.
Even years into the deployment of the internet, many believed that it was still a fad. Of course, the internet has since become a major influence on our lives, from how we buy goods and services, to the ways we socialize with friends, to the Arab Spring, to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet, in the 1990s, the mainstream press scoffed when Nicholas Negroponte predicted that most of us would soon be reading our news online rather than from a newspaper.
Fast forward two decades: Will we soon be seeing a similar impact from cryptocurrencies and blockchains? There are certainly many parallels. Like the internet, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are driven by advances in core technologies along with a new, open architecture — the Bitcoin blockchain. Like the internet, this technology is designed to be decentralized, with “layers,” where each layer is defined by an interoperable open protocol on top of which companies, as well as individuals, can build products and services. Like the internet, in the early stages of development there are many competing technologies, so it’s important to specify which blockchain you’re talking about. And, like the internet, blockchain technology is strongest when everyone is using the same network, so in the future we might all be talking about “the” blockchain.
In March, Bank of America (BoA) filed a patent application titled “System and Method for Wire Transfers Using Cryptocurrency .” The application was published on September 17 by the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office.
In the same way that it has torn apart newspapers, radio and the postal service, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney worries that technology will disrupt the banking and financial services industry. His biggest concern is governments will fail regulate it until it’s too late – “an Uber-type situation,” as he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. Continue reading… “Will the sharing economy disrupt the banking industry?”
Majority of the people in the U.S. could be “banking” with startups in the next three to five years.
For investors and entrepreneurs, when looking for opportunity in the financial industry where technology can have the greatest impact, the best place to start has been with one of our oldest institutions: banks. However, while critical to our economy, banks are generally inefficient, have high fixed costs and don’t exactly elicit happy thoughts from the average consumer. It’s for these reasons, among others, that the biggest opportunities in the financial world revolve around the disintermediation of these banks and core financial services.
The rapid expansion in ownership of smartphones and tablet devices make today’s consumer want to research financial services on demand.
The banking industry has experienced a strong recovery after one of the worst financial crisis. In the evolving banking landscape in emerging economies, the industry is quickly transforming.
Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1997 Reed Hasting returned his copy of “Apollo 13” to the video store and was hit with a late fee so big that he was embarrassed to tell his wife about it. Out of this moment of humiliation the idea for Netflix was born, a business that would eventually take down the entire video rental industry, and its excessive fee-charging practices in the process.