More than words

Someone told me yesterday that fintech is a primary pillar for them.

Fintech has become one of those terms that people throw around to mean… whatever…

I won’t lie. I flinched.

Fintech has become one of those terms that people throw around to mean… whatever… and hide all manner of sins. And although this is not the hill I am going to die on… it also usually indicates that the conversation that will follow will be innocuously vague and a waste of my time.

So…

I kept it together long enough to ask what they meant by that term and, to my profound surprise and their ever-lasting credit, they had a useful working definition of what that term meant to them in a way that would be a helpful heuristic tool for their team. It’s nice to find out you are wrong, sometimes.

So I fessed up and told the folks I was chatting to that I tend to flinch these days when the word is used because, largely, it is a lazy shorthand. The thinking of what it is meant to be just isn’t there. It’s a catch-all, anxiety-defying wave of the hands at stuff that we have no other place to dump.

Not quite our mental attic, or the garage with crate upon crate of all the equipment we’ve bought over the years… boxing gloves resting against unfinished canvasses in amateurish watercolours.

Fintech is exactly like that in terms of the fact that we dump a lot of things under its banner. Things that don’t go together. Things that don’t need to be together. Things that probably need more space than we are currently giving them. Things we may not be serious about. Dabbling, you know.

And yet, it’s not quite the language equivalent of your garage.

It is as messy, but not as… optional.

This is stuff we need, after all. Not the boxing gloves. But the stuff we lump under fintech.

We keep doing this, by the way. Creating banners to capture the things that we need to think about but don’t necessarily know how…

It was always thus, we concluded, though it can’t always be so.

In the beginning, there was transformation.

I hate to break it to you, young ones – or the older ones with short memories – but way before fintech, way before innovation… we had transformation.

Same thesis: the world is changing and some of the stuff we do is no longer fit for purpose. Change is hard and uncertain. People get in their own way. New technology is always nervousness inducing. Let’s focus on this as a process that is special and different, needed but likely to meet with resistance.

Then we moved into the innovation era. The above language was not changed one iota – because it still applied. But we added to the mix a need for creativity. A need to think outside the box and get inventive. Because the pressure of things inside our organisation being obsolete was now compounded with other segments of society making waves with their use of technology. Creating a vibe we wanted a share in. Making waves we also wanted to ride.

Needless to say, we weren’t very good at this. We weren’t terrible, but we weren’t naturals. And it took us a painfully long time to work out that creativity was great, but it was not essential to survival. Adaptability was.

So the language of transformation and innovation stayed exactly where it was as we started frantically pointing in the direction of big tech and small tech alike: from cross-industry giant to scrappy start-up (identical twin brothers and a gerbil called Kahlua… true story).

We used all the language and now frantically gestured towards the new vertical emerging in our own backyard.

We called it fintech and literally threw everything new in it.

Blockchain? Fintech.

P2P lending? Fintech.

Containerisation? Fintech.

Design thinking? Fintech.

Good UX? BNPL? You got it. Fintech.

Only cloud isn’t fintech. The unit economics of an API-first tech estate ain’t fintech. A digital economy ain’t fintech.

And putting all the stuff that has no other home into that one mental category made sense… until it didn’t.

Because some of this stuff is not even new anymore.

And ‘fintech strategies’ entail working out how to reverse-engineer the API wrapper someone created on top of a legacy system… you are reverse-engineering because there are no SDKs… and there is no documentation… and nobody knows where the engineer responsible lives or you would have paid them a visit by now.

But fintech strategies also entail taking about consent management protocols and generative AI ‘training’.

And the talent you need for each, for both.

And the ways of working this talent needs from you.

How is it helpful to call all those things by the same name?

And yet.

Even I do still say fintech sometimes.

And for the avoidance of doubt, when I do… I mean one of two things: the technology that was neither invented for nor scaled by FS players but is creatively brought to bear on our problems, or whatever you meant when you used the word first.

I said it already: this ain’t the hill I am dying on, man.

But I will tell you what is: the industry has consistently underestimated the size and pace of change and the wider economy’s appetite to go with it.

And it has doggedly overestimated its own ability to get with the programme.

And we can’t keep doing that.

So whatever you call the mass of things your organisation needs to do next in order to keep up with a world that won’t slow down for you, make sure the term helps your teams work out what to do next.

What to focus on.

What to prioritise.

What to protect.

What systems, functions and values to home in on.

What language to use when speaking about your company and their mission.

And since that language will shift… that mission will change… the company itself will change, in a changing world… getting bogged down in the precise definitions of words is not the hill I should be dying on after all.

But I will tell you what is… whatever language you use to describe what needs to happen next… maybe work out a way of elevating the need for good documentation into your mission statement, alongside the innovation DNA you profess, so that next time we are having this conversation, at least we can be getting on with some work.

We would all be much obliged.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. 

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.