I was recently invited to talk in this panel animated by Marion Moreau (FrenchWeb) at Société Générale with Aymeril Hoang and Stéphane Distinguin, two heavy thought leaders in digital innovation.
Here are a couple of insights.
1/ Are startups challenging current bank services?
Yes, one illustrative chart was pulled out by CB Insights earlier on. In every bank service, we can see now several startups offering similar services hence competing with traditional banks on user experience and services.
At AXA Strategic Ventures, we follow 2 categories: P2P Lending with Particeep and Robo Advisors with FundShop. On P2P, when an industry faces such services, we often observe disruption. Napster in the music industry or Skype in telecom industry are perfect example. Today, we can clearly see the rise of P2P in FinTech and soon we will have to deal with P2P Insurance solutions. That surely means huge disruptions coming for our future investments.
2/ Last year, 69% of investments in the City went to Fintech. Is that a signal?
Yes. Accenture has issued a report about global fintech investments. The graph shows an increasing trend over the past 2 years. I am in insurtech since 2013 with AXA Seed Factory, which has become now AXA Strategic Ventures, a global fund with 6 offices. Each office is in the fintech hub (San Francisco, New York, London, Berlin and Zurich) and we can testify also on this trend. Back in 2013, I met about 100 companies in fintech. Last year, we received about 500 deals. Probably, we reach 1000 deals by year end.