My apartment sits a couple of stories above my local pub O’Reilly’s. It’s got a pretty sweet beer garden too. On the rare warm Summer nights, we get here in Dublin, I’ll open my window and my God, the noise. Different topics, different opinions, getting louder, more vociferous and more entrenched as the night goes on.
Sometimes it feels the Fintech conversation is getting a bit like O’Reilly’s at ten o’clock in the evening. And, at the risk of making it worse, I do sometimes find myself lapsing back into my old life in Retail Product Management and thinking, “Yeah, all this tech is great, but show me the money!”
I accept technology will have unknowable and unforeseen impacts on the P&L. However, there are some points incumbent banks need to consider when cutting through the chatter to meet challengers who haven’t disrupted the industry yet but are starting to threaten.
Banks are going to have to adjust to the biggest changes to their profitability model since the introduction of computers in the 70s and 80s. The formula of interest income and fees offset against costs that has served so well for over 200 years is going to experience significant change, on both sides of the P&L.
