Andra is currently a Fellow with the Anthemis Group in London. She took the fellowship to allow herself to explore how financial services could be delivered as “services” with the technology from today and how the architecture of the building blocks would look like. It would not look anything like the banks of today.
Andra built her career in consulting mostly with IBM and SAP and she has worked internationally implementing complex financial systems for large corporations and banks. For the past six years she has been involved in the Fintech market in London, setting up a Business Innovation Lab in IBM, working as a Lead Solution Architect for the Innovation Lab of Lloyds Bank and as a mentor for Startupbootcamp.
Traditionally, retail banking services are delivered by vertically integrated, fully owned, and highly concentrated institutions (retail banks). The evolution of the Fintech market players serving or of those targeting the retail-banking sector leads me to believe the industry is on the path to fragmentation on horizontal lines (e.g. marketing & distribution, transaction processing, payments, back office services). On these horizontals, the players, will compete with each other but will collaborate across horizontals, delivering their services through partnerships.
There is a lot of talk about unbundling the banks or banking as a service. What is a bank made of though? What makes a bank to be a bank? What do you need to get connected to the financial services networks? A bank is obviously much more than the various good-looking apps, which invaded the market. Our analysis will go from front office to back office applications, using our collective knowledge. If you have no experience of financial services or you have a lot, you are welcome to join the session.
During this session we will together unbundle a bank with the view of understanding how the various components and functionalities can be delivered with the technology from today. We will be looking at existing start-up propositions, which aim to serve or replace parts of the banking functionalities in order to understand what their purpose is, how they generate revenue, if they are a real threat to the industry or not. Ideally, together we will come up with ideas for new building blocks and businesses for the financial services of tomorrow.
