At Eight Roads, Alston is focused on assessing early-stage investment opportunities in fintech and enterprise software, and advising portfolio companies on strategic, financial, and operational issues. Prior to joining, he co-founded the mobile payment startup SumUp. The term fintech means different things to different people. To me, fintechs are companies that use core technology to take an innovative digital-native approach to delivering financial services.
Beyond that, there are technologies that cut across these areas such as cryptocurrencies or digital assets, as well as a wider tech enablement layer called techfin that, as the name implies, is technology for financial services. Since all of this tech is really the backbone for where the entire financial services industry is headed, in my view fintech is financial services.
When fintechs first started emerging in the early and mids, the big question was whether they would eat away at the different universal bank subcategories I mentioned before and effectively unbundle traditional financial services. By the late s, however, a number of super apps and other platforms had emerged that were actually doing the opposite.
They rebundled financial services, but did so by taking the most profitable and interesting parts of multiple categories and mixing and matching different business models. Since then, it has become clear that there are many different possible approaches to a fintech business.
Contrary to what you might think, many established financial institutions are actually doing just fine. You could argue that without companies like Stripe and Toast, FIS would have maintained more market share. But you could also argue that because of the innovation that these fintechs are driving throughout the ecosystem, the overall pie is growing to the benefit of the entire ecosystem.
