For those who can’t watch it (the video), the question I asked is whether there’s a Fintech bubble and is it about to burst. With $12.7 billion raised for over 1,000 start-ups in the past five years, there’s a huge amount of people buzzing around this market and some say a further $20 billion is going to be invested in just this year alone. What’s going on?Well what is happening is a re-architecting of financial services with technology. Today, it is the integration of technology with money; the digitalisation of money; and the move from local to global exchange. That’s what I blog about every day but my claim in the video is that this is just what we’re talking about today, and it’s a transitory moment as the picture long-term is far bigger. It is far bigger because we are completely rethinking how we exchange value. It is why bitcoin is a big deal, because that is the most likely form of the digitalisation of money. It is far bigger because the old bank model of the physical distribution of paper in a physical network is turned on its head when we are moving to the digital distribution of data in a global network.Our world has changed thanks to the internet, and the most likely outcome is a new value exchange ecosystem of value tokens, value exchanges and value stores. I’ll blog more about that another day but, meantime, this explains why (a) there is no Fintech bubble and therefore (b) it will not burst.There’s no Fintech bubble because we’re re-architecting our world to digitise value exchange. This will therefore morph our world into something different and new. It is not until the different and new is finished that any bubble will burst. For example, it is noteworthy that we talk about the internet bubble and burst of the 1990s, and yet we should note that the internet bubble burst in 2001 and then came back because we moved from Net 1.0 to Net 2.0. As I’m saying we have another five generations of internet to go yet, there’s no bubble here. Just a rise and fall of innovation as we move through the internet age.That’s why there’s no Fintech bubble bursting. Just a re-architecting of finance through technology that, until it finishes, will see us moving through waves of innovation and change.
