Have you ever seen a FinTech founder pitch his company? Since 2011, I have witnessed a whole bunch of them across the world. There was one thing common to the pitches irrespective of whether they happened in the US, Europe, or Asia—everyone talked about disrupting banks and displacing incumbents. When MEDICI was founded in 2013, this space was still in its infancy. Nobody cared about the mushrooming FinTech startups or their founders. So these founders had to try harder; and they did what they had to do: pitch hard and talk about total disruption. These FinTech founders had challenged traditional offerings by the banks & FIs and believed that over-the-top (unlicensed) products would triumph. This kind of thinking stemmed from the fact that this was happening in other industries like transportation (Uber, Ola, Grab), communication (WhatsApp, Skype), and real estate (Airbnb)—a power shift from asset-based value propositions to aggregation and asset-light OTT platforms. The FinTechs were looking to disrupt the traditional financial services industry similarly, but as some of them grew larger in size, they were met with a bitter truth. |
