Innovative companies are positioning themselves in the financial services market

• Expansion of the financial services market through innovative concepts and new options

• Processing of online and mobile payments via the internet and smartphones

• Personal finance management solutions for customized financial and transaction data

• New financing methods via crowd funding and peer-to-peer platforms

• More transparency and expanded options for access to financial investments via investment portals

Source: COREinstitute

The transformation of digital structures is changing everyday social and economic realities: new methods of communication and participation are appearing, added-value chains are changing, and new players are entering established markets. The financial services market, despite its isolation through regulations, is also feeling the impact of these changes.

Many of the new players and offers fall within one of four business areas and segments (see graphic above): Personal Finance Management, Payment Transactions, Asset Management and Lending Operations.

The field of payment transactions is the most dynamic of these four areas. In addition to the long-standing options for processing online payments, which are continually being expanded, many new offers focus on paying via smartphone. Aside from services that enable customers to pay with their smartphones via an app, particular attention should be paid to those offers that enable merchants to accept card payments via a device attached to a smartphone (Square, iZettle).

Personal Finance Management tools support the consolidation of accounts. They allow customers to access the balances of all of their own accounts. Furthermore, they provide the option of structuring and evaluating expenditures according to categories or time periods chosen by the user. These tools thereby not only help users to keep track of various accounts, but also support them in optimizing their expenditures and in setting up savings plans (Mint, Finanzblick).

In the field of Asset Management, the palette of offers ranges from information about stocks and markets (StockTwits) to investment recommendations (yavalu) to the opportunity to follow traders and thereby optimize one’s own portfolio.

Crowd-funding platforms offer a new means of financing creative projects and companies. The platforms enable artists and entrepreneurs to present their projects and funding needs to the public. Financing occurs via the community, the crowd. The most well-known crowd-funding platform is Kickstarter in the USA. Similar platforms were launched in Germany last year, such as Seedmatch, Startnext, and Innovestment.

This overview of new offers, concepts, and players shows that the financial services market has not remained unaffected by the digital structural transformation. New players have introduced creative options both in core areas of banking services, such as payment transactions and loans, as well as in the field of personal finance management. Time will tell whether and to what extent banks will follow and also integrate new products into their portfolios – or whether they will lose individual areas and services entirely to new players.