Fintech for a Day
For banks and financial institutions
Ten years ago, the fintech playbook was simple. Pick one part of banking, take it apart, and do that one thing better than anyone else. Wise took cross-border transfers. Revolut took multi-currency cards and fee-free prepaid. Klarna took deferred payments. Each looked like a narrow product, and many banks treated them that way.
That was only the entry point. Once these companies had won customers with a single product, they kept adding capabilities, through technology and through new market moves. A card company becomes an account. A payments app picks up savings, lending and investing. The one-trick pony has become a broad financial relationship.
AI will speed this up. We are about to see new ways of managing money, and fintechs, built to move quickly, are well placed to lead them.
So what are the banks doing? Many of them talk a great deal. The usual response to a new player is that the market is too small. Why fight for $50 million in revenue when your annual turnover is in the tens of billions? Because markets change, and $50 million can become billions faster than a planning cycle expects.
Unbundling is done. Re-bundling is next.
The fintechs pulled banking apart. The next move is putting it back together around a customer’s actual problem. Banks start this race with real advantages: customers, trust, licences and years of data. What most of them lack is a fast, cheap way to test an idea before it enters a twelve-month roadmap.
Customer-centric innovation is on every bank’s strategy slide. Far fewer have something concrete to show for it, such as a specific idea, in front of a specific customer problem, in a form leadership can click through and react to.
Fintech for a Day
That is what Fintech for a Day is for. It is a rapid prototyping workshop for banks and financial institutions. A team of up to eight picks a real customer problem and leaves with a re-bundling concept and a clickable prototype to show leadership.
Run by Erik Ingvoldstad and Steven Lim, the format is built to be a first step. Teams that want to take their best idea further can continue into a longer programme of building and piloting, with the same people and the same thinking carried through.
If your team wants to try it, get in touch at hello@acoustic.sg.