In a series of articles, The Economist reports about technology companies that compete with traditional banks in areas ranging from lending to payments and wealth management.
The introductory article refers to AngelList and references reports by Goldman Sachs (The Future of Finance, copy posted here), BCG and Accenture. And it highlights two factors driving the structural change which I have also emphasized in a recent article: Technology and vanishing trust in banks. The other articles cover:
- Peer-to-peer lending, mentioning Lending Club, Prosper, SoFi, Zopa, RateSetter, Lendable and Kreditech.
- Crowdfunding of businesses, mentioning Funding Circle and OnDeck.
- Wealth management, mentioning Wealthfront, Betterment, Personal Capital, FutureAdvisor, nutmeg and motif and offering this comparison:
- International money transfers, mentioning TransferWise. (See also my earlier blog post.)
- Payments, mentioning Venmo as well as Square, Stripe and others.
- Emerging markets.
- bitcoin’s blockchain technology, summarized in the following figure, and mentioning Ripple and CoinSpark:
- A conclusion, mentioning Currency Cloud.
Updates—some more firms in the business: