Mikhail Golomb is a financial executive who has spurred growth at firms in a number of sectors ranging from technology to digital health. Over the course of his career, Mikhail Golomb has become well versed in emerging fintech, including cryptocurrency.
Source: Tech in Asia
Since its first major period of growth in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the fintech industry has been considered at odds with traditional finance. Big banks and other financial firms have often been painted as “at war” with Fintech in the ensuing 10 years, with many articles outlining the ways in which fintech was disrupting—and thereby set to destroy—the finance industry.
However, as much as the spread of fintech is forcing banks and other major types of financial firms to change the way that they conduct business, some pundits balk at the term “disrupt,” suggesting that it is not an entirely accurate description of what fintech is doing. In an increasingly modern world with a large number of tech-savvy citizens, some experts argue that Fintech is merely driving necessary, pioneering development—encouraging firms with outdated operational models to rethink how they facilitate value exchange services via healthy competition.
Perhaps nowhere is the benefit of fintech and the competitive pressure it has put on the banking sector more obvious than when one considers the immense potential of blockchain technology on value exchange. Blockchain has stirred the interest of some of the largest banks in existence, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, BBVA, and Barclays, many of which are experimenting with or participating in investigative consortiums focused on exploring the uses of the groundbreaking technology. While many aspects of fintech have worried big banks, blockchain has proved to be a source of motivation for financial institutions to invest in and acquire fintech firms themselves. Many in the industry believe that these investments on behalf of banks are positive, as blockchain has every potential to be the next big game-changer in the value exchange market. Acquiring new, high-energy fintech firms for in-house collaboration may be the only thing that can help big traditional brands stay on the right side of the coming change, which some experts believe is imminent.
They believe in this possibility because blockchain may be the technology that completely changes the landscape of the finance sector as a whole. The idea is to find the “Uber” of the banking sector—a fintech unicorn that goes beyond moderately refining existing services and instead entirely changes the way that people bank. The major tech unicorn companies to accomplish this feat in various industries over the last decade (a list that includes Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, and Amazon) have done so by acting as technology-based intermediaries between the professionals providing a service and customers who want to purchase that service. The companies have served as processing centers that mediate the interactions between sellers and buyers, rather than acting as a company that invests in the services they provide themselves (for example, Airbnb does not own any accommodations, and Uber does not own a fleet of cars).
Blockchain by its very nature offers users many of the necessary capabilities to serve as an intermediary between people who need to use banking services and those who are on the receiving end of the banking services—all at a much higher speed and much lower operating cost than the same services provided by banks. Blockchain could completely replace some of banking’s most outdated processes by operating as a decentralized processing engine that enables global, peer-to-peer value exchanges. Exchanges could be completed on the blockchain faster, more affordably, and safely through a universal ledger, rendering much of the oversight provided by banks obsolete.
Although blockchain is a type of technology, rather than a unicorn company, it could fill the same role for finance as Uber did for transportation or that Airbnb did for travel accommodations. In these rare instances of great change and development within a business sector, the old brands that survive are only those which can warmly embrace and work to further the new norms in the industry.
Mikhail Golomb 