How Monavate and other B2B Fintech providers are creating a more sustainable financial ecosystem

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Monavate Co-Founder and CCO, Scott Lucas, recently shared his insights and expertise as part of an expert panel on Star’s Shine podcast. The series explores the evolution of technology and design thinking within major industries including fintech, automotive & mobility and health & wellness.

In this episode, the focus was on fintech. Host Tom Hunt alongside Scott, Olivier Bessi, Star’s Product Director of Fintech, and Prerna Goel, Head of Customer Experience at ClearBank, examined the evolution of today’s fintech ecosystem.

Below is a sneak peek of what they had to say, but don’t forget to listen to the full podcast to get the latest from the cutting-edge world of fintech.

 

Looking at fintech’s history.

As fintech has experienced unimaginable growth and diversification, Scott and the team start off by looking at where the industry, and the term, first came to be.

 

These are a few of their insights:

Fintech puts technology at its core. Scott began by explaining that ‘fintech’ is exactly as the name suggests — technology that enables finance to happen. In that way, the ATM could be seen as the original fintech from 50-odd years ago. Yet the mindset of modern-day fintech is similar. It puts technology at the core to deliver user-friendly financial services to customers and businesses. And in so doing challenges established financial firms, their legacy systems, processes and mindsets.

Market collapse spurred fintech’s growth. The global financial crisis of 2007-08 was an important chapter in the history of fintech. It created a lot of distrust in the financial system – people didn’t trust their banks. At the same time electronic money institutions (EMIs) and other non-traditional financial services were popping up. Essentially, this distrust of banks and other institutions allowed people to be more accepting of new fintechs on the market, Scott explained.

The push model became a pull model. “With smartphones and consumers becoming more aware of what is possible with technology, we saw a very similar trend in the entertainment industry where we moved away from a push model to a pull model,” according to Prerna Goel. So, instead of using a push model to develop new technology to meet an unidentified need, fintechs used a pull model that translated consumer demand into new financial services. This customer-first approach paired with a more inclusive environment promoted by industry regulators allowed the fintech ecosystem as a whole to grow exponentially.

Setting a new industry standard

The panel then took a closer look at their own B2B services, while also highlighting the most disruptive technologies on the market. The added value of these end-to-end opportunities is massive for small start-ups and large incumbent players alike.

 

Two of the biggest examples include:

Issuing BIN sponsorship: This is Monavate’s specialty. Basically, we use our card scheme licences and membership of Mastercard, Visa, Discover and more to help clients quickly and effectively issue cards for their target customers or business colleagues. As Scott explains, in the past, getting to market in anything less than 9-12 months was just unheard of, because of the endless form filling and certifications required. Now, with a BIN sponsor, anyone can go from contract signing to issuing cards in 4-6 weeks. This speed-to-market is often the deciding factor for many innovative concepts to launch.

To learn more about this service, don’t miss our deep-dive piece which answers the big questions about BIN sponsorship.

Banking as a service (BaaS): As with BIN sponsorship, BaaS providers take care of another lengthy and expensive process to make banking technology and services more accessible. Instead of a card schemes licence, providers such as ClearBank provide their banking licence to non-banks so these businesses can provide any number of banking products like payment processing and current accounts. “The very reason that we exist is to help other [fintechs] use our banking license so they can deliver what needs to be delivered,” summarised Prerna.

 

Ready to learn more?

We’ve only scratched the surface of how leaders in B2B fintech providers are reimagining partnerships between financial institutions, third-party developers and consumers to fuel innovation throughout the ecosystem.

Listen to the podcast now to hear directly from Scott and the experts about the technologies that are ready to serve everyone, from established banks to newly created start-ups.

About Scott

Scott is Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Monavate, a payments solutions provider born and based in Cambridge, UK. Well-known, highly respected within the industry and with exceptional knowledge of ATM, card issuing, and BIN sponsorship, Scott has held senior positions at institutional banks, major European acquirers, and now Monavate; a company driven by a core belief that launching and managing financial products needn’t be as complex as the industry has forced it to become – something he believes fintech has the power to change.