‘The biggest challenge is the distraction over disruption’: FIS chief product officer Rob Lee

Fidelity Information Services, one of the world’s largest banking technology companies, provides the back-end software and financial services technologies for 20,000 clients in 130 countries. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, FIS’ main clients are banks. The company runs a Little Rock-based startup accelerator program, which just selected its second class of mentees.

Rob Lee, chief product officer for banking and payments and a mentor for the financial technology accelerator program, spoke to Tearsheet about the biggest issues affecting banking, what motivates the company to support startups through its accelerator program, and the biggest trends affecting the industry. Here are excerpts, edited for clarity.

What’s the biggest issue banks face with the proliferation of startups developing competing lines of business?
The biggest challenge is the distraction of the discussion over disruption. Banks are every day faced with what are they doing with new technologies how are they blocking disruptors or embracing disruptors. I don’t think that our bank clients are being impacted from a transaction perspective with disruptors going into their business.

What’s the biggest bottleneck affecting how banks operate today?
The biggest problem is that the information [about customers] tends to be siloed across the organizations.

Is the purpose of your startup accelerator program to allow others to build software products that can seamlessly interact with bank platforms run by FIS?
We bring 10 new companies that are building things around the financial services world. All those apps need data and customer information to drive their value proposition and our API gateway provides a way to build on top of that.

So you’re really looking for startups that can partner with the banks?
We invest in research and development and innovation and startup companies not in the accelerator — the accelerator is just one way to do that. [The startups] are really pushing the envelope; for example, we have a company called Alpharank, and they’re using the Facebook social graph paradigm and applying that to financial services.

Is there a trend that is overhyped or has lost your attention?
There was a lot of hype about blockchain a year ago when it was seen as a panacea, and we’ve seen that subside somewhat. We’ve seen a lot of public proof of concepts, a lot of consortiums, and not much actually happening to manage real transactions.

What’s the next big thing?
You’ll see massive changes in the use of voice as an input. Today Siri and Alexa are about 95 percent accurate — there is some latency in that but in the next few years, with all the investment, it’s predicted that it will get to 99 percent accuracy with close to zero latency.

 

 

 

 

New breed of financial startup

Really interesting financial startups are popping up everywhere.  Most of what I’m seeing falls into a few different buckets

  • sentiment analysis: the ability to take social media’s temperature on a certain stock, certain market and forecast future price movements.
  • personalized recommendations: for years, the financial community got away with giving generalized information.  Now, it’s getting granular.
  • portfolio replication: lots of new tools, platforms that allow you to essentially program your investing activity to mimic another investor, a strategy, or an algorithm

I’m compiling this list of some of the best cutting-edge financial startups.  What do you think?

Continue reading “New breed of financial startup”

The Future of Online Finance, Startups, and How to Win – with ValueCruncher’s Mark Clare [live]

Well, it’s take 2 for an event I’ve been looking forward to —

We’re hosting a live session with Mark Clare, investor, entrepreneur, and founder of ValueCruncher.

Mark’s written extensively about the competitiveness in the online finance space.

===> He’ll join us to talk about:

  • what the future of online financial content has in store
  • who’s positioned to win
  • the current market view of hot startups
  • what other entrepreneurs and executives in the space can do to assure success.

(If we’re lucky, he’ll talk about his own experiences founding and growing his own startup in the space.)

Please join us Tuesday September 6th at 5PM ET (1PM PT) live.

The online event is free but we’re going to cap attendance at 250.

Please bring questions and be prepared to ask them during the session.

>>>Sign up here to join us.<<<