The Fintech industry is often touted as the go-to solution to chance finance as we know it today. Despite facing a lot of adversity in the first few years, consumers and corporations are warming up to fintech in recent months. Mainly banking customers are eager to explore what these fintech startups have to offer. Overall trust remains a key hurdle to widespread adoption of alternative financial solutions, though.
Fintech Starts To Make An Impact
Capgemini’s World Fintech Report paints a fascinating overview of how the financial sector is slowly evolving. With over 8,000 customers surveyed across fifteen different countries, it is becoming clear Fintech startups are gaining traction. However, there is still a very long way to go before we can speak of mainstream adoption.
Up-and-coming financial services providers, which are traditionally less than five years old, are seeing a lot of positive reactions so far. As was to be expected, younger generations of tech-savvy customers are showing an appetite for disruptive companies. Emerging markets, which usually had to deal with a lack of access to financial services, are leading the charge in this regard.
Interestingly enough, investment management is quickly becoming a booming sector for Fintech companies. Nearly one in five customers use nothing else but these services. Additionally, close to one in four consumers use Fintech investment services in combination with services provided by other startups. Very intriguing findings, considering these are still the very early days of fintech innovation.
Any gains made in the financial sector are greeted with bigger hurdles to adoption. Despite the appeal, Fintech startups may have right now, there is still a lack of overall trust in unknown companies. With under 25% of surveyees openly admitting they trust their fintech provider, there is still a lot of work to be done. Existing financial service providers, on the other hand, are trusted by 36.6% of their customers.
But there are other challenges to take into consideration as well. Putting together a viable innovation strategy has proven to be the main hurdle for incumbents and traditional service providers. Achieving the expected results due to these innovation strategies proves to be tough as well, with only 10% of executives seeing somewhat acceptable results.
It is easy to draw parallels between the Fintech sector and Bitcoin adoption on a global scale. Even though there is some level of adoption to speak of, things are not changing in a big way overnight. Trust plays a critical role in Bitcoin as well, and very few people understand the protocol well enough to trust it.
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