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In this conversation, we chat with Will Beeson, who currently works at Standard Chartered Ventures. Previously, Will was the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at digital bank BELLA, as well as, a Principal at Rebank, a fintech advisory firm. Will’s banking entrepreneurship streak doesn’t end there, he co-founded Allica, a digital bank for businesses in the UK. After starting his career at Citigroup in New York, Will spent nearly a decade in Europe working with and managing financial services companies prior to launching Allica. Will holds a BA from Amherst College (USA) and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Charterholder.
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Timestamp
1’01”: Setting the scene in Fintech 2022 & what are the symptoms of things going wrong in the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) space
10’01”: The recipe for success in the BaaS space and the opportunities over the next coming years
13’19”: The dialetic between infrastructure and application and their phases of innovation
19’32”: Optimising the operating model for maximum efficiency & where/how regulatory influence plays a part
24’27”: The tangible impact of regulation & how this may help alleviate the current state of affairs
28’04”: The cost impact of fintech solutions on the value chain & what these costs may look like
31’31”: The optimal outcome for fintech infrastructure: embedded & bundled, or independent development, or acquisition of leading providers of services
34’00”: The optimal outcome for fintech applications: build a full service neobank or build a revenue generating component and grow from there
37’13”: Channels to use to connect with Will & Lex
Sneak Peek:
Lex Sokolin:
…you've got a lot of the horizontal players saying, "Look, build on our APIs," and a challenge on reaching the customer. So, one way it could go is the bundling of all of this stuff together again into a fat API first embedded finance like Super Bowl. But then is that the right outcome? Or maybe the right outcome is just, it was always hopeless to try and put scotch tape of APIs on traditional banking and it's all computational blockchains and DeFi, that's the only way to go. How do you think the industry dynamics will play out?
Will Beeson:
Yeah, so firstly, I think you nicely verbalized the way I think about this also, which is that there has to be a consolidation optimization on the efficiency side. I think one opportunity is for banks, sponsor banks that want to genuinely commit to this long-term. I think they can right now build a very strong competitive position by bundling, sounds dangerous, but finding ways to either independently develop or acquire the third or fourth leading provider of some of these services to wrap them into the sponsor bank or banking-as-a-service stack.
I think the other opportunity that the ultimate winners in the sponsor bank space have is to rather than think of themselves, the way that many SaaS companies generally do, which is like, "Here's our self-serve API, put in your credit card number, here's the documentation, do whatever you want," to think more strategically about how they can really…
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