Pentti Hakkarainen es miembro del Consejo de Supervisión del BCE. En un reciente discurso, en enero de 2022, disertó sobre la labor supervisora en la época de la transformación digital, refiriéndose, entre otras cuestiones, a los casos de éxito de algunas Fintech, como WeBank, Nubank o N26, y a la entrada de las Bigtech en el mercado financiero como oferentes de servicios.
Baste señalar las extraordinarias trayectorias de la entidad china WeBank y de la brasileña Nubank. A poco que se preste atención, resulta que la referencia implícita en ambas denominaciones comerciales a los “bancos”, deliberada o no, es más que patente, como también lo es que se trata de territorios de origen extensos con un arraigo limitado de las redes bancarias tradicionales. Sin duda, la contribución a la inclusión financiera de estas entidades es notable.
La entidad alemana N26 también representa un caso de éxito, con presencia en 24 países y millones de clientes, aunque, en cambio, ha tenido que retirarse de los mercados norteamericano y británico, a pesar de que las altas estimaciones de mercado muestran la expectativa de la capacidad de generación futura de beneficios.
En este interesante discurso también se afirma, de soslayo, que Amazon y Google están comenzando a ofrecer servicios financieros…
Pentti Hakkarainen, “The digital transformation of the European banking sector: the supervisor’s perspective”, speech at the Institute for Financial Integrity and Sustainability, 13 January 2022
“[…]
The efficiency gained from providing solely online services can be seen in the example of the Chinese entity WeBank. Launched in 2014, it now serves more than 200 million individual customers and 1.2 million small and medium-sized enterprises, yet it doesn’t have a single branch and employs only 2,000 people. Its fixed costs are therefore lower, while its income from customers is one-thirtieth of that of banks’ average and it can reach a return on equity over 30%. Another example is the Brazilian entity Nubank, which provides credit cards and personal loans to 50 million customers. Most of these customers couldn’t get a loan from traditional banks owing to their lack of credit history. But Nubank uses data about customer behaviour and its own algorithms to perform its assessment.[
Big tech firms like Amazon and Google were also able to start offering financial services. They did so quickly using their networks, customer data and available technology to focus on specific financial services attached to their other services. Traditionally, banks have been gatekeepers of relevant customer data, in particular the data needed to assess customer creditworthiness. But big tech firms can also increasingly perform a similar assessment leveraging on their customer data, therefore it seems that banks’ traditional gatekeeper role is being challenged.
[…]
That being said, offering technology-based, user-friendly services is no guarantee that the provider will be immediately profitable. The German entity N26 is an example of a fintech firm that has not yet succeeded: despite its 7 million customers across 24 countries, it has had to stop offering its services in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, its estimated high market value shows expectations of future profitability.
[…]”.
(Imagen de la autoría de pikisuperstar – www.freepik.es)
