The venture capitalists who have invested billions of dollars in this wave of new financial technology — think Venmo and Bitcoin — have been left waiting for a breakout star<br />that actually looks like a threat to even a part of the big banks’ business.<br />Start-ups focused on improving payments have had more success — the most valuable recent American<br />technology start-up is Stripe, which helps new companies accept online payments.<br />Some start-ups looked at becoming banks, so they could offer deposit insurance — among other things — but they generally found<br />that getting a bank charter required more time and money than is available to even the most successful start-ups.<br />Much of this change, however, is now expected to come from the banks themselves as they absorb new ideas from the technology world<br />and shrink their own operations, without necessarily losing significant numbers of customers to start-ups.<br />But Stripe and other payment start-ups like Square are all built on top of the existing credit card<br />and banking infrastructure and have not posed any type of fundamental threat or challenge to the existing giants.<br />Lending Club, which makes personal loans, and OnDeck, which focuses on small business loans, initially grew swiftly and went public,<br />but both companies have run up against the limits of how fast a lending business can grow without being a bank.<br />China has four of the five most valuable financial technology start-ups in the world,<br />according to CB Insights, with Ant Financial leading the way at $60 billion.
