The future is not digital… the present is

There was a time when ‘fintech’ meant ‘start-up’.

We have work to do, and however we choose to do it, let’s at least stop acting surprised at it all

Unhelpful, but at least we knew where we stood.

There was a time when looking at start-ups was the thing you did to understand new tech.

Remember those times?

Oh, the innocence.

Even innovation teams inside big organisations, tasked as they were with thinking about things and learning things and building things and testing things, mostly (let’s be honest now) looked at start-ups for answers. And inspiration. And ways to move things forward.

We all did.

And it sort of worked for a time.

Horizon scanning became a team sport. You bought equipment. The consulting firms wrote reports (expensive reports) and built ‘tools’ because you needed an app for all things, didn’t you?

Don’t ask me. I don’t know if they worked. I just know they existed. They were pretty. They were of their time.

They had futuristic names and a lot of data and pretty interfaces.

They told you how many payments companies there were in the world (thousands at any one time, but not the same thousands) and how many of them got funded, but they didn’t tell you much about what would happen next, obviously.

Innovation theatre to my left, unicorn chasing to my right.

What days those were.

And please believe me when I say… we were not cynical about all this. We believed it all.

Naïve, perhaps.

But not cynical.

There was also a time when we really truly believed, as an industry, that technology was a pick and mix sweet counter where we could choose to our taste and at our pace what to use and what to leave.

And although we feared disintermediation from other businesses, it never occurred to us that the disintermediation would come from the technology itself and the relentless economics of digital distribution done right.

Again, naïve, perhaps.

But the slow ‘in my own time’ approach to technology adoption banks exhibited at first was not arrogance. At least not primarily.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because although both of those eras are done and dusted and over… they have not been replaced by anything that is much more useful. And although the industry is no longer naïve, it is not wise yet either.

We now know that we have entered a technology paradigm that rewired the world and the economy, so of course it affects us. Not to our taste and not at our pace. It is the context in which we live. No longer a single thing but the canvas on which all things play out.

We are no longer looking for the silver bullet and the single answer. We are still hoping for magic beans and unicorns, don’t get me wrong. We are just not looking for them expecting that they exist anymore.

And we also know we are not the top dog in this race. We don’t know who is… yet.

We are looking at Big Tech trying to decide if it’s them.

But there is a dawning realisation that this isn’t how the game is played anymore.

If only it was.

And the challengers of a few years back are also looking over their shoulder because they aren’t as shiny anymore… the era of free VC money is over, paper unicorns don’t seem to weather storms well and new technology is coming down the pipe fast and the cutting-edge of 10 years ago is blunted now. Still usable but not the next big thing, if that is what we were talking about in the first place. And who’s laughing now?

Actually, no-one is. And that is how it should be.

None of this is easy. None of this is straightforward and none of this is a single-click strategy.

So I’m not entirely sure what the words ‘innovation’ and ‘fintech’ and whatnot are doing in your lexicon anymore. I don’t get how you can still utter ‘digital’ like it’s a foreign word you are trying on for size, the yuzu paste of your tech menu.

We are here. We have been here a while.

Come on now, we have work to do, and however we choose to do it, however much or little of it we choose to take on, let’s at least stop acting surprised at it all.

#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.