U.S. banking is surprisingly far behind the curve, and hasn’t led the world from a tech or innovation perspective for many decades.
The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.
In short, the UK has a very active banking sector that’s been rapidly (for banks) innovating for many decades. So the environment and ecosystem are well developed for further and faster innovation.
In the U.S., it seems banks gave up on tech innovation decades ago, and decided that innovation in fees and punitive treatment of customers was their preferred approach. As a result there just isn’t an environment for new innovation, the incumbents find it much easier to crush competition, rather than compete. Why the same isn’t true in UK (which until recently had remarkably few distinct banks), is probably down to the nature of law and regulation, which gives customers lots of rights, and actively punishes banks that don’t uphold them.
> The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.
I think most of those things are EU initiatives, which the UK was a member of at the time.
It’s a mix. Many of these innovations came into existence before their EU counterparts. Faster payments, for example, is a completely different system to instant SWIFT payments which most of the EU uses.
Having said that, Denmark is another notable country for its innovation financial systems, ahead of the U.S., many of its EU neighbours and in some areas ahead of the UK.
But the UK has always had a vibrant and innovative financial services sector. Something the EU always had a bit of love-hate relationship with, and something Brexit has seriously damaged.
> But the UK has always had a vibrant and innovative financial services sector. Something the EU always had a bit of love-hate relationship with, and something Brexit has seriously damaged.
To be fair, most of the regulations were EU ones, but they were driven by the UK as a member, and they supported them nationally.
Contrast Ireland, which has the same EU regs but is much, much further behind the curve because our regulators focus on different things.
Counter-anecdote: my brother is building a startup (cashflow forecasting tool, check out https://tailwindapp.eu/) on top of those banking APIs. Granted, he's spent many years in the industry, but as I understand, API access was by far not the hardest part of it.
What do you mean it's impossible to get access to?
If you're a start-up wanting to share your customers' financial data, you can make an API.
If you're a start-up wanting to get access to your (potential) customers' financial data from other institutions, you can get access through one of the many providers (Tink, GoCardless etc), or become a provider yourself with enough work.
I thought we were talking about PSD2, which the European Parliament adopted in 2015. I recall many startups were launched specifically to capitalise on new opportunities provided by PSD2, so I find your comment confusing.
> It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades.
Thanks for making me feel old I was thinking "it hasn't been anywhere near that long, I remember the rollout like it was yesterday". Turns out that rollout was 15 years ago.
Not sure if anyone else can comment on prevalent software in banking. But it seems like IBM’s FTM is fairly prevalent. The underlying technology from a glance seems dated (Java 8, bunch of uncontainerized shell scripts running the show) and highly proprietary in the bad ways. E.g the proprietary stack hasn’t seen innovation. Add to that, the same teams deploying this software.
The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.
In short, the UK has a very active banking sector that’s been rapidly (for banks) innovating for many decades. So the environment and ecosystem are well developed for further and faster innovation.
In the U.S., it seems banks gave up on tech innovation decades ago, and decided that innovation in fees and punitive treatment of customers was their preferred approach. As a result there just isn’t an environment for new innovation, the incumbents find it much easier to crush competition, rather than compete. Why the same isn’t true in UK (which until recently had remarkably few distinct banks), is probably down to the nature of law and regulation, which gives customers lots of rights, and actively punishes banks that don’t uphold them.