Chief Solution Architect and Vice Leader for Fintech at Huawei, Lee Maina has predicted that banks will soon disrupt FinTech and that will deplete the primary sources of revenue for the latter.
He therefore urged Fintech firms to start innovating and creating more value in the fintech-dependent fulfilment sector of the ecosystem instead of hanging on to their primary sources of revenue.
Lee Maina was speaking on a Digital Public Infrastructure panel at the Mobile Technology for Development (MT4D) forum during the just-ended 3i Africa Summit in Accra.
After a very insightful and rich discuss, the moderator of the session, Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey asked all the five panellists to look into the crystal ball and predict how the ecosystem will go and how players should position themselves to play a pivotal role in Africa’s advancement through digital innovation.
“Looking into the crystal ball,” Maina said “I think we’re heading into a very interesting time, where not only technology is going to disrupt our Fintech business but also a giant is awakening and this giant is basically banks.”
He noted that traditionally, banks were always happy with serving their high value customers, but of late, they have decided that Fintechs are eating too much of their lunch so they do want to come into the intermediary transactions space because it is basically eroding their current accounts business.
Indeed, hitherto, it was fintechs which disrupted banking and put bank accounts in the palms of being hands on the foundation of mobile money. So instead of people opening current accounts with banks and paying maintenance fees to the banks, they kept their money in digital wallets and rather earned interest on them while having constant access to their moneys as well.
But Lee Maina predicts that all that is about to change, saying that once banks get into that space strongly, a lot of the P2P (person to person) and ‘vanilla’ transactions like cash in and cash outs will all become free.
He said Fintechs must therefore begin to consider how to bring the various sectors such as agriculture, insurance and others which have been slow with the adoption of Fintech quickly to the table because the other sources of revenue will go away very fast.
