The Fintech Book : Financial technology handbook for investors, entrepreneurs and visionaries. Reviewed

By @SimonCocking. See more about the book published by Wiley on its website and buy it from Amazon here.

A front-line industry insider’s look at the financial technology explosion

The FINTECH Book is your primary guide to the financial technology revolution, and the disruption, innovation and opportunity therein. Written by prominent thought leaders in the global fintech investment space, this book aggregates diverse industry expertise into a single informative volume to provide entrepreneurs, bankers and investors with the answers they need to capitalize on this lucrative market. Key industry developments are explained in detail, and critical insights from cutting-edge practitioners offer first-hand information and lessons learned. 

This book is a useful insight into what the future of banking and fintech innovation could look like for all of us. The book was created in an interesting way by crowd sourcing the content. This has resulted in a lot of leading thought leaders from the banking, financial services, and innovation sectors contributing. There are numerous insightful chapters which really set you thinking as the authors put forward their visions and predictions of what the future might look like. David Gyori‘s predictions of how the future in 2030 might be were particularly interesting including the self-pay store and (hopefully) the password memorial. Huy Nguyen Trieu‘s call for more ethics in Fintech was also a valuable piece as it is not something often explicitly mentioned. Spiros Margaris‘s chapter on the Fintech Supermarket and Devie Mohan‘s piece were also two others who contributed thought provoking chapters.

Overall it is a useful and thought provoking book, though there are a couple of areas where it could perhaps be tweaked to offer even more value. The book is printed in landscape rather than portrait, and while this may offer some novelty value. It does make it a real pain to read, especially with one hand, as which ever part of the book you are not directly holding flops down on either side. Also while the authors are listed at the back, it does not give the page number on which their contribution is, requiring minor detective work to find where they are in the book. Finally, as a crowd sourced book, there are times where the content feels a little uneven between longer and shorter pieces, more general versus in-depth pieces, and varieties in style and repetitions of concepts and insights across pieces.

As a primer and introduction to the area it is a useful book, with some great insights from some really smart people who have given a lot of thought to the challenges faced in this area, and this is probably the spirit in which to approach and read the book. Use the book to grasp which ideas are most relevant and applicable to your business and then follow up on those authors and organisations.

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