Where is the Uber of financial services?

Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger. He co-presents the On The Other Hand podcast.

You know about Sherlock Holmes and the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, don’t you?  Watson:  “But Holmes, the dog did nothing in the night-time!”  Holmes:  “That, Watson, was the curious incident.”

To be honest, I can’t actually remember why the dog did nothing in the night-time.  I think we can safely say, though, that the dog wasn’t a dachshund.  Our dog is a dachshund,  and he does altogether far too much in the night-time, particularly when it comes to barking loudly at every passing small-hours pedestrian, urban fox and  Deliveroo rider.

Anyway, the point of the Holmes/Watson exchange is that the dog did nothing when, by rights, you’d have thought he would have done something.  And the analogy I want to make is with the emergence, or non-emergence, of major new consumer financial services brands in the first 25 years or so of the digital era.

I’m old enough to remember – quite easily old enough, actually – the early days of excitement about digital, back in the last years of the last century.   We all agreed that digital would bring about huge and fundamental change in pretty much every industry, but perhaps most of all in financial services.  The technology was just made for it.  Innovation would go ballistic.  Costs would plummet.  Dickensian legacy providers would be swept away.  It would all be amazing.

Now let me be clear, as Sir Keir Starmer is so fond of saying.  Quite a lot of things have happened.  There’s been a fair bit of nocturnal barking.  Millions, maybe even billions of start-up fintechs have appeared, although an awful lot of them have then fairly quickly disappeared again when the money ran out.  More positively, one big new sector – price comparison sites – has emerged.  A couple of challenger banks – notably Monzo and Revolut – have achieved critical mass.  And I suppose you’d have to say, even if reluctantly, that crypto wouldn’t have come as far as it has without digital making it so frighteningly easy.

But somehow, when I think back to our late-20^th-century levels of anticipation, I can’t escape a sense of disappointment,   Do we now have the big, famous, transformational brands we were expecting and hoping for?   Price comparison sites apart, where are the brands that have really changed our behaviour?  Where is our industry’s Amazon?  Where’s our Uber?  Where’s our AirBnB?  Where’s our Deliveroo?  Where is our Rightmove?  And so on and so on.

And another thing.  There’s been a distinct lack of barking from the financial services divisions of the tech giants themselves.   I remember a much commented-on quote by Bill Gates from many years ago, to the effect that if Microsoft could get into the money transmission business the banks would soon be history.   Bankers trembled.  We all waited with bated breath to see what would happen  – but nothing really did.

Over the years, there were rumours of big initiatives in the offing from various tech giants.   Google were about to do mortgages.  Amazon were getting into life assurance.  nVidia… well, I’ve never been quite sure what nVidia do, or were about to do.  But if any of these things ever happened, they didn’t happen much.

Perhaps I’m being unfair.  Perhaps Compare The Market is our Amazon, and Monzo and Revolut are our Uber and AirBnB.  And perhaps I’m underestimating the barriers to entry that defend the financial services industry – technical ones like the need for huge sums of capital and our onerous regulatory requirements, and competitive ones like the way that the legacy financial services industry, after some early fumbles, eventually got its digital act together and made a pretty good job of filling many of the available market positions.

But the opportunities are still out there, and I can’t help thinking there’s a lot of change and transformation that still hasn’t quite happened yet.  I’m expecting we’ll hear a lot more from that dog in the night-time over the next 25 years.