Under the Radar: Bank Executives Not Aware of Key Fintech Startups [Chart]

Flying Under The Radar

Bank Executives Not Aware of Key Fintech Startups

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Mid-afternoon single malt scotch. Summers in the Hamptons. Six-digit bills for yacht maintenance. If you thought bankers live in a bubble, you are correct. Today’s chart is even further evidence: banks are unaware of the very products and services that are vying to pull the rug from under them.

Fintech startups such as Square, The Lending Club, Nutmeg, and Betterment are taking the world by storm, but so far bank executives are unaware of their existence. A survey of 110 bank executives, ranging from directors to C-suite management, found that the majority of respondents do not know key fintech startups that are rapidly changing the banking landscape.

First, the benchmark: 92% of execs knew about Paypal, one of the first real fintech companies to exist. Paypal was started in 1998, IPO’d in 2002, and then was subsequently bought out by Ebay for $1.5 billion. Last year, the company moved $228 billion in 26 currencies across more than 190 nations.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the newcomers:

The Lending Club has a $5 billion market capitalization, after debuting on the NYSE after a widely celebrated IPO in December 2014. It raised $870 million in the IPO, yet only 18% of banking execs know about the company and what it does.

Square was co-founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who was previously involved with starting a little-known company called Twitter. Square is an electronic payments service that was last valued at $6 billion in 2014, when it did its last raise of $150 million. Somehow only 15% of bank execs know about this company.

Nutmeg is the company that bank execs know the most about. About 23% of respondents know of the company. Nutmeg is an online wealth management platform from the UK that last raised $32 million in 2014 at an undisclosed valuation.

Betterment is another online financial adviser that was valued at between $400 million and $500 million in early 2015 with billions of assets under management. Roughly 73% of respondents had never heard of this fintech startup.

This reminds us of the early days of file-sharing and eventually music streaming services on the internet. Music labels, which are almost all but gone of the way of the dinosaur, fought with legal threats, lobbying, legislation, and lawyers rather than by way of innovation.

That may be the only way that the big banks can fight if it becomes too late.