Top 10 things JPM’s Jamie Dimon said about fintech
Start your workweek off right with a roundup of Jamie Dimon fintech gems. While he’s sometimes disparaging of the shady behavior of the startups, it turns out JPMorgan’s chief is very much focused on fintech. For someone who claims that fintech isn’t actually anything different, he certainly has a lot to say about the space: from Silicon Valley to payments to marketplace lending to consumer data, Jamie Dimon will tell you how fintech is changing finance.
Serious contender for the best Jamie Dimon quote ever: When asked about how financial technology is replacing real jobs, JD replies,
“There are downsides to flying — people die every now and then. Do you want to stop all air flights?”
Read more: Dimon can’t stop talking fintech and just dropped a remark that JPM plans to offer free roboadvice to its best clients.
Paypal isn’t a bank, but it may be the new face of banking
In the race to shift services to the web or mobile phones, the stakes are in the billions of dollars for traditional banks and upstarts alike. Paypal has said that it has no intention to upend banks, and that its next target market are the 2 billion plus people who are currently unbanked. Nevertheless, with its popular Venmo unit enabling consumers to take small money transfers into their own hands, Paypal seems very happy to serve banked consumers as well.
As with any new technology that encroaches on traditional banks’ turf (think bitcoin), banks have been quick to point out that due to a lack of government regulation, your money isn’t as secure with Paypal as it would be with a traditional bank. Will that stop the gravitation towards mobile wallet services offered by Paypal and others like Stripe, Square, SoFi, and TransferWise? The Wall Street Journal thinks not.
The road to nowhere: legal cannabis business can’t be solved by fintech
A clash in state and federal rulings has prevented banks from accepting money from cannabis sales. This legal limbo prevents banks from doing business, but more importantly is life-threatening to marijuana retailers; with nowhere to bank, “ganjaprenuers” deal entirely in cash, making them a prime target for thieves.
Fintech has come up with some creative solutions to this state versus federal imbroglio. However, at the end of the day, the problem is a legal one. Until Congress is replaced by robots, tech won’t be the savior for legal marijuana banking.
The march of the bots for customer service: should bank CIOs slam shut or swing open the door?
The emphasis here is on humanizing robots rather than “robotizing” humans, letting those humans who care most about outcomes make sure the end-to-end customer experience is continuously improved.
This means that long-suffering (human) customer service representatives will finally get (robotic) personal assistants to help them proactively find the information they need to use on their computers. In this way, customer service professionals will spend less time searching for things and more time actually serving customers. However, outdated legacy banking systems may prove to be a major stumbling block on the way to this robotic/CRM utopia.
For more on cyborg fintech, read “How quant hedge funds balance computer and brain power”.
AIG enters the crowdfunding market [drops mic]
Insurance exists to reassure and protect policy holders. Whatever may come, insurance says comfortingly – whether car accident, disease, fire, loss, theft, or even death – we’ve got you covered.
Which is why crowdfunding insurance is somewhat of an anomaly. Though AIG just entered the market with Crowdfunding Fidelity, a new crowdfunding insurance policy that will be made available to select crowdfunding platforms, the coverage period and cap mean that the insurance offered is very, very limited.
Bottom line: investors probably shouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet.
Photo credit: Loozrboy via Visual hunt / CC BY-SA