The COO of UBS' Wealth Management arm said banks are committed to working with fintechs rather than seeing them as competition. This is a general more collaborative trend that we have seen over the last 12- 18 months, which is the result of Start-ups being more open to engage with Banks and Banks with start-ups
Dirk Klee told Business Insider: "The key takeaway is that we as incumbents, we have long moved on to a full collaboration model." Klee was speaking to BI at the Economist's Finance Disrupted event in London last week, which brought together mainstream finance companies with fintech startups looking to reinvent areas of banking and finance with the help of technology. Klee said: "We are embracing fintechs and actually we believe that there is great innovation. We need to find very smart ways to partner up and improve our existing business model." Fintech has exploded around the world since the financial crisis, with a proliferation of startups tackling finance with new digital tools. Startups such as online money transfer service TransferWise initially positioned themselves in opposition to the banks, leading commentators to speculate that the upstarts would "each their lunch."