A lot has been written recently about the potential for startups in the financial services sector, from Mark Andreessen’s “we can reinvent the entire thing” rallying cry to some great blog posts about the future landscape of unbundled FinTech. This excitement (and the concurrent 3x increase in FinTech funding) makes sense — as these authors note, now is definitely a transformative time for the industry. However, despite the great successes in FinTech in the past year or so, we still haven’t seen the emergence of a full stack financial services startup. Almost every high-profile new company has an old-guard financial institution behind it, not to mention the longstanding financial infrastructure that underlies almost every global transaction. Lending Club and Simple rely on banks, for instance, while Wealthfront, FutureAdvisor and others use fully-disclosed clearing firms to run their respective businesses.

https://medium.com/@dougnelson10/financial-services-unbundling-revisited-327dec79aea4