The Secret of Success in FinTech: Partner, Merge, Acquire

Everything new is well-forgotten old.

FinTech is not a disruptive force (and blockchain is not a disruptive technology). Rather, it’s the history of institutional banking repeating itself. And the further into 2017, the more apparent it is that the global market is extremely limited for ~8K FinTech startups to have a sustainable future altogether. In the years ahead, the success denominator in FinTech will be its scale. Only the ones able to score powerful partnerships will step into the next phase of development – institutionalization, which is a short track to becoming another financial institution and they very same type of organization tech entrepreneurs are now so passionate to call obsolete.

Let’s look at some of the most recent events falling into the proposed frame. It starts with identifying who are the main figures, and what are their strategies.

Partnerships, acqui-hires, and institutionalization

At the beginning of October, accounting software firm Xero partnered with Curve, a startup that lets you consolidate all your bank cards into a single card and track your spending. Six months ago, Xero passed 1 million subscribers worldwide on its global cloud accounting platform – 20X the number from five years ago, when the count was at just 50,000 subscribers. Xero also counts 100,000 business advisors – not too bad of a partner ...