These are the female faces of the industry
Every Wednesday, in our popular “Faces of the Industry” series, individuals from the payments and banking industry answer our standardized questionnaire of ten questions each. Over the years, a large number of interesting answers have come together.
This series also features many great women in the industry whose ideas, vision and foresight are making a significant impact on the financial industry and driving the move towards greater diversity. Today, here’s a selection of their answers to the question: How do you define Fintech?
And here are their answers:
To me, “FinTech” does not necessarily equate to enterprise. It’s more of an approach to fundamentally rethink the structure and service of the financial industry using technology. That’s why FinTechs are also shaking up the financial services industry – and can be both disruptive challengers and valuable partners.
Kristin Baumhardt, CrowdDesk,
They do this either by providing a solution directly to the customer or by enabling other companies to improve their banking product or even to enter the financial services offering in a new way. The latter in particular is exciting, as it enables embedding and linking in completely different product lines and is thus much closer to the actual process of the user. Our partner Prosperity, for example, already offers its clients flexible wealth accumulation that can be managed digitally through their platform. With our white label solution, customers can now also do their banking directly and have additional flexibility around savings.
Carlotta Laetitia Mondino, finleap connect
FinTechs are companies that develop solutions to improve financial services for users through technology.
The combination of a very established market (financial industry) and the ability to use technology to change it.
Katja Hunstock, finleap connect
FinTechs, to me, are companies that are innovating with the future of our industry, have little legacy, and mostly stand for a service, software-as-a-service.
Maren Heiß, DKB
FinTech companies use technology to build new and innovative solutions to everyday problems that have something to do with financing, investing or payment flows in the broadest sense.
Aiga Senftleben, Billie
To me, fintech is more than just the use of technology in the banking industry, because it’s been around for a long time. By fintech, I mean companies that have a digital-native tech stack, meaning they were built from the ground up on cutting-edge technology. They function on an API basis and thus enable the docking of further services to one’s own infrastructure and can in turn be integrated into the infrastructure of other providers.
Fintechs are characterized by the fact that they always think from the perspective of customers and create added value for them along several dimensions: they are more transparent, more cost-efficient and enable their customers to make better decisions for their financial lives than traditional players.
Dr. Ella Rabener, BCG Ventures
To me, FinTechs are companies that recognize the market’s need for innovative products and services around open banking and are constantly re-evaluating the possibilities of “traditional banking” and thinking ahead about what the market needs with an ever-changing regulatory environment.
Birte Goslowski, finleap
All-inclusive? Startups in the financial industry that are trying to solve an old problem differently or tap into a new trend first. Personally, I don’t base this on the degree of innovation of the technologies, because I think that a new combination of existing technologies or processes can also become an innovation.
Ulrike Moritz, finleap
