Fintech lessons in 2022 with METACO, Fime, TransferMate and more

This month at Fintech Times our focus turns to reflection as we look back at developments over the past 12 months. 2022 has certainly been a challenging year for anyone with global economic activity experiencing a severe slowdown, with inflation higher than in decades.

What lessons have you learned from 2022? That was the question we asked Fintech Times community and what a great response. Today we present the thoughts of managers at Fime, METACO, Savana, Happy Mango and TransferMate.

Seamus Donoghue, METACO

As growth manager at METACOa provider of safety-critical software and infrastructure to the digital asset ecosystem, Seamus Donoghue says 2022 provided less learning and more a reminder that change is the only constant.

“It can happen suddenly and accelerate quickly, but perhaps the real lesson is how quickly recent cycles have repeated themselves in crypto. We’ve experienced centralized failures reminiscent of Enron, Madoff, Lehman and MF Global just the last few months.

“Many of the high-flying crypto companies that achieved eye-popping valuations from fundraising through 2021 have now either rapidly collapsed into bankruptcy or seen a depletion in their addressable market and growth rate.

“So the bottom line is that the rate of change remains exponential, and so we should expect an equally rapid recovery from bearish cycles. The technology is not going away, and while the tide is out and the market froth is settling, it’s time to build for the next wave of adoption.”

Emily Steele, Savannah

To Emily Steele, president and CEO of financial software firm Savannah, her takeaways from 2022 are that digital banking (historically defined by the digital consumer app) is now considered table stakes for a financial institution.

She adds: “However, as banks have eagerly launched new consumer digital apps over the past few years – new silos were formed in the process and the unification of systems between bank-assisted and consumer self-service channels was effectively eliminated.

“Banks now face the challenge of removing these back-end and front-end silos to increase operations and ensure channel consistency.”

Lionel Grosclaude, Fime

Lionel Grosclaude, managing director i Five – the biometric card validation company – has more than 20 years of experience in the banking, telecom and IT sectors across Europe and the US. He believes that one lesson we have learned from 2022 is that fraud now exists as a full industry in itself.

“A whole sophisticated ecosystem exists to buy, sell and exploit sensitive data,” he says. “This growth in fraud is seen primarily on e-commerce sites, due to issues around user authentication. Therefore, merchants and their payment service providers must be able to balance security requirements with providing a good user experience.

“If the safety regulations in place are too restrictive, this can lead to wagons being abandoned and lost sales. Conversely, if they are not strict enough, sellers can suffer financial losses and reputational damage.

“A combination of active and passive authentication frameworks can ensure the payment flow is secure while limiting the impact on the customer experience. In addition, innovations such as payment tokenization, biometrics and integrated computing allow these authentication procedures to be further enhanced to protect both merchants and their customers.”

Sinead Fitzmaurice, TransferMate

CEO of B2B payment technology company TransferMate, Sinead Fitzmaurice, says that 2022 has been an unprecedented year of market turmoil.

“Although I prefer not to refer to it as ‘lesson learned’, I believe unpredictable market turbulence can serve as a positive reminder to companies to always seek cost-effective, transparent solutions when conducting their activities.”

“Especially in terms of cash flow, to ensure that their working capital cycles are driving their business at maximum efficiency at all times.”

Kate Hao, Happy Mango

The key lesson for the fintech industry is to “get back to basics”, says Kate Hao.

Hao is the founder and CEO of Happy Mango, which aims to bring greater transparency to credit reporting.

“The collapse of FTX, the impact of which is still unfolding, exposed the shocking lack of fundamental risk management in one of the most hyped and highly valued fintech ventures.

In addition, fintech investors are now demanding returns in the basic form of profitability rather than “growth at any cost, as even the deep pockets Goldman Sachs has decided to scale back its consumer finance ambitions following Marcus’s unimpressive financial performance.”