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We’ve entered the most profound era of change for financial services companies since the 1970s brought us index mutual funds, discount brokers and ATMs.

No firm is immune from the coming disruption and every company must have a strategy to harness the powerful advantages of the new financial technology (“fintech”) revolution.

The battle already underway will create surprising winners and stunned losers among some of the most powerful names in the financial world:  The most contentious conflicts (and partnerships) will be between startups that are completely reengineering decades-old practices, traditional power players who are furiously trying to adapt with their own innovations, and total disruption of established technology & processes:

• Traditional Retail Banks vs. Online-Only Banks: Traditional retail banks provide a valuable service, but online-only banks can offer many of the same services with higher rates and lower fees

• Traditional Lenders vs. Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: P2P lending marketplaces are growing much faster than traditional lenders—only time will tell if the banks strategy of creating their own small loan networks will be successful

• Traditional Card Processors vs. New Age Payment Processors: Square processed $24 billion in payments from over 2 million customers last year—will traditional processors like Visa who own the payments pathways be able to defend their territory from new invaders?    

• Traditional Asset Managers vs. Robo-Advisors: Robo-advisors like Betterment offer lower fees, lower minimums and solid returns to investors, but the much larger traditional asset managers are creating their own robo-products while providing the kind of handholding that high net worth clients are willing to pay handsomely for.

As you can see, this very fluid environment is creating winners and losers before your eyes…and it’s also creating the potential for new cost savings or growth opportunities for both you and your company.

After months of researching and reporting this important trend, Business Insider Intelligence has put together an essential briefing that explains the new landscape, identifies the ripest areas for disruption, and highlights the some of the most exciting new companies. These new players have the potential to become the next Visa, Paypal or Charles Schwab because they have the potential to transform important areas of the financial services industry like:

• Retail banking

• Lending and Financing

• Payments and Transfers
• 
Wealth and Asset Management

• Markets and Exchanges

• Insurance

• Blockchain Transactions


If you work in any of these sectors, it’s important for you to understand how the fintech revolution will change your business and possibly even your career. And if you’re employed in any part of the digital economy, you’ll want to know how you can exploit these new technologies to make your employer more efficient, flexible and profitable.       

Among the big picture insights you’ll get from this new report, titled The Fintech Ecosystem Report: Measuring the effects of technology on the entire financial services industry:

• Why financial technology is so disruptive to financial services—it will soon change the nature of almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management.
• The basic conflict will be between old firms and new—startups are re-imagining financial services processes from top to bottom, while incumbent financial services firms are trying to keep up with new products of their own.
• Both sides face serious obstacles—traditional banks and financial services firms are investing heavily in innovation, but leveraging their investments is difficult with so much invested in legacy systems and profit centers.
• Meanwhile, startups are struggling to navigate a rapidly-changing regulatory landscape and must scale up quickly with limited resources.
• The blockchain is a wild card that could completely overhaul financial services. Both major banks and startups around the world are exploring the technology behind the blockchain, which stores and records Bitcoin transactions. This technology could lower the cost of many financial activities to near-zero and could wipe away many traditional banking activities completely.

This exclusive report also:

• Explains the main growth drivers of the exploding fintech ecosystem.
• Frames the challenges and opportunities faced by incumbents and startups.
• Breaks down global and regional fintech investments, including which regions are the most significant and which are poised for the highest growth.
• Reveals which two financial services are garnering the most investment, and are therefore likely to be transformed first and fastest by fintech
• Explains why blockchain technology is critically important to banks and startups, and assesses which players stand to gain the most from it.
• Explores the financial sectors facing disruption and breaks them down in terms of investments, vulnerabilities and growth opportunities.
• And much more.

The Fintech Ecosystem Report: Measuring the effects of technology on the entire financial services industry is how you get the full story on the fintech revolution.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide to the fintech revolution, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of financial technology.

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The Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee — the lower house of the Russian legislature — spoke about cryptocurrencies today. The deputy had a few interesting things to say about Russia’s hardline stance on cryptocurrencies in the past and possible future of the legality of Bitcoin in Russia, particularly for settlement with individuals […]

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Larry Summers is defending his call to get rid of the $100 bill.

In a Washington Post op-ed written with the Harvard Kennedy School's Peter Sands, the Harvard professor focused on a Wall Street Journal editorial that took on his original call to ban the denomination.  

Summers is not alone in calling for the end of larger denominations.

Last week, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi said the bank is considering a ban of the 500 euro note because it's a convenience for criminal activity as well as savers. (The ECB, we'd note, has taken interest rates into negative territory in an effort to kickstart the eurozone economy and move inflation closer to its 2% goal.) 

And while the Journal wrote, "Beware politicians trying to limit the way you can conduct private economic business. It never turns out well," Summers contended that this claims contains, "two levels of illogic."

The first is that even a staunch libertarian recognizes that there must be some antifraud efforts in an economy that won't impact business activity. 

But Summers seems to take slightly larger issue with the Journal's contention that — through monetary policy — politicians are working to curtail the economic freedom of ordinary people.  

Here's Summers (emphasis ours):

[It] is surely a stretch to assert that ceasing government’s active effort to circulate and print 500 euro notes or $100 bills constitutes a government infringement on the conduct of private economic business. Do the Journal editors believe that liberty was constrained by the U.S. decision in the 1960s to stop printing $1,000 dollar bills or to stop issuing bearer bonds? Surely it is not a government’s obligation to provide every means of payment or store of value that someone might choose to use. Nor, it should be emphasized, did the abolition of the $1,000 put us on any kind of slippery slope to monetary perdition.

Our advocacy for the elimination of high denomination notes is based on a judgment that any losses in commercial convenience are dwarfed by the gains in combatting criminal activity, not any desire to alter monetary policy or to create a cashless society ... And we believe that for the foreseeable future there will be a role for cash in modern economies, though we would not be surprised if in many contexts its transactions costs come to exceed those of various electronic payment schemes.

Summers' bottom line is that removing the $100 note would only have a muted effect on a very wealthy minority, as most people would not mind the inconvenience of carrying a few extra notes in lower denominations.

He also noted that governments already routinely intervene in private commercial affairs (think tax laws), and people have the freedom to pick whichever legal tender they like (think Bitcoin).

And so while removing the $100 bill may be seen as some vague infringement of liberties, to Summers it is simply the logical step in our ever-more-financialized economy. 

You can read his full piece in The Washington Post here »

SEE ALSO: LARRY SUMMERS: It's time to kill the $100 bill

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