Unbundling, Fidor, and the model for approaching financial startups
9 September 2015
Stephen Greer
I´ve recently had multiple conversations with financial institutions about the trend of unbundling financial services by FinTech startups. In fact, it’s hard to discuss the future of the industry without touching on it. Articles from Tanay Jaipuria, Tech Crunch, and CBInsights speak openly about inexorable disruption. They all tell a fairly similar story. Unbundled products and services disintermediate financial institutions by improving on traditional offerings. Banks lose that value chain. Banks become a utility on the back end, essentially forced by the market to provide the necessary regulatory requirements and accounts for nonbank disruptors. With images like this (see below), it’s hard to argue that it isn't happening—at least at some level. 
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the hype surrounding disruption by FinTech players (shallow revenue, small customer base, etc.), but even if only a few manage to become sizable competitors, that still represents a significant threat to banks´ existing revenue streams. There’s also data pointing to higher adoption in the future. A study from Ipsos MediaCT and LinkedIn showed that 55% of millennials and 67% of affluent millennials are open to using non-FS offerings for financial services. This number is surprisingly high, and the largest banks in the world are paying attention. The threat of losing the customer-facing side of the business is a legitimate risk that banks face over the next 5-10 years. But there´s a possible solution that could enable banks to remain relevant even as they begin to see some of their legacy products or services fall to new entrants: be more like Fidor Bank. Fidor Bank is a privately held neobank launched in Germany. It has a banking license and wants to transform the way financial institutions interact with their customers by creating a sense of community and openness. The bank views its platform, fidorOS, as a key differentiator that allows it to offer customers services from start-ups or new financial instruments. For example, it offers its customers Currency Cloud for foreign exchange as well as the ability to view Bitcoin through its platform. Going forward, it may make more sense for financial institutions to take this approach. Banks can´t be everything to their customers, and there´s a healthy stream of market entrants trying to chip away at the banking value chain. A middle way is that banks become an aggregator for popular nonbank FinTech offerings as they become popular. This would preserve the benefits of traditional bundling by aggregating offerings and re-bundling them alongside its home grown services. Some benefits include:
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the hype surrounding disruption by FinTech players (shallow revenue, small customer base, etc.), but even if only a few manage to become sizable competitors, that still represents a significant threat to banks´ existing revenue streams. There’s also data pointing to higher adoption in the future. A study from Ipsos MediaCT and LinkedIn showed that 55% of millennials and 67% of affluent millennials are open to using non-FS offerings for financial services. This number is surprisingly high, and the largest banks in the world are paying attention. The threat of losing the customer-facing side of the business is a legitimate risk that banks face over the next 5-10 years. But there´s a possible solution that could enable banks to remain relevant even as they begin to see some of their legacy products or services fall to new entrants: be more like Fidor Bank. Fidor Bank is a privately held neobank launched in Germany. It has a banking license and wants to transform the way financial institutions interact with their customers by creating a sense of community and openness. The bank views its platform, fidorOS, as a key differentiator that allows it to offer customers services from start-ups or new financial instruments. For example, it offers its customers Currency Cloud for foreign exchange as well as the ability to view Bitcoin through its platform. Going forward, it may make more sense for financial institutions to take this approach. Banks can´t be everything to their customers, and there´s a healthy stream of market entrants trying to chip away at the banking value chain. A middle way is that banks become an aggregator for popular nonbank FinTech offerings as they become popular. This would preserve the benefits of traditional bundling by aggregating offerings and re-bundling them alongside its home grown services. Some benefits include: - Maintain the consumer facing side of the business by letting customers access these service through your platform
- Increase cross-selling and marketing opportunities
- Preserve a convenient and frictionless experience by reducing the fragmentation of unbundling