Companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook have taken steps into the financial industry, but now a French minister is urging FinTechs to stand their ground.
While delivering a speech at the Forum Fintech, French junior minister Cedric O urged entrepreneurs to collaborate with traditional banks to ensure Europe remains in the FinTech innovation race.
“Developing new technology in the financial sector is a matter of being able to compete on the global stage, but it’s also a matter of sovereignty,” he said, Sifted reported. “We need to succeed, or even our democratic sovereignty will be in danger.”
O continued argued that the entry of companies like Apple and Microsoft into this space is threatening French banks and FinTechs.
Some of the examples of tech titans moving into FinTech includes Uber’s Uber Money initiative, and Facebook introducing a payment solution as well as spearheading the cryptocurrency project Libra. Then, of course, you have Google Pay, Amazon Pay and Ant Financial.
However, not everyone is as pessimistic about big tech entering this space.
“The increased interest of large tech companies in the FinTech space only serves to affirm the significance of the sector itself,” Ellison Anne Williams, founder and CEO of Enveil, the cybersecurity company that has found itself on both the RegTech100 and CyberTech100 lists in the last year, recently told FinTech Global. “Big firms don’t focus on sectors where they don’t see longevity and the potential for significant growth.”
Others have argued that these companies entering the space could create more opportunities for innovative FinTech entrepreneurs.
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