Once upon a (very recent) time, if customers needed financial services of any kind, they went to their bank. From investing to storing funds to making payments, the bank offered the total financial services bundle. And that was by design, as Ingo Money CEO Drew Edwards told PYMNTS in a recent conversation. The banks designed their systems, so it was easy to move money into their coffers, but not so easy for customers to move money out or around. It’s sticky, he noted, but in the same way that a fly trap is.
However, the rise of FinTechs over the last decade or so has changed the game — because collectively, they’ve broken the bundle.
“It started with all the [peer-to-peer] P2P guys who unbundled how we pay each other,” Edwards said. “Then the online lenders rose up and said they could do lending better and faster than the banks. Then came the robo-advisers, which meant you didn’t need an adviser to be an investor. And we came along with ubiquitous mobile remote deposit capture, so now consumers can put their checks into any account they want from a single app in minutes.”