Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Jamie Dimon is trash-talking fintechs. Again.

Hello and welcome to Protocol | Fintech! This Friday: Plaid gives the JPMorgan CEO one more reason to worry, Oracle's new strategy for banks and a downside of digital cash.
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Big news from Plaid and JPMorgan Chase hit on the same day this week. And they highlight the tensions between the Old Guard and the Young Turks of finance.
Plaid announced Wednesday that it raised another $425 million in funding, boosting its valuation to $13.4 billion. News of the monster round had just hit the wires when JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned shareholders in his annual letter: Fintech is becoming a bigger threat.
Plaid's solo run is paying off. Plaid's huge funding news comes just a few months after its blockbuster merger with Visa collapsed when the Justice Department moved to block the deal, saying it was anti-competitive.
So what's Dimon worried about? The JPMorgan boss told shareholders that banks are "playing an increasingly smaller role in the financial system."
Can banks and fintechs get along? Yes, actually. Despite Dimon's warning, big banks forging partnerships with fintechs is now fairly common.
Is there some hypocrisy here? JPMorgan recently invested in fintech startups like Axoni and Zanbato and reportedly is preparing to take Marqeta public. And the bank and Plaid signed a data-sharing agreement in 2018. If Dimon really thinks fintech is a problem, maybe his bankers haven't gotten the memo.
The disruptions of COVID-19 are driving banks to more digital account openings which creates opportunities for accelerating application fraud — and creates urgent new challenges for financial institutions. In this white paper, Early Warning® and Aite Group reveal how fraudsters exploit digital account opening and how banks can fight back.
What fintech trends do you find exciting?
A lot of these fintechs were born in the cloud, with the ability to use all the transformation technologies that are being invented on the fly. We've seen technology adoption happen very rapidly. We've seen social technologies, mobility, big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence. … These are very transformational technologies and when you are born in the cloud, you have no legacy to worry about. You can actually take advantage of these. What's exciting about fintechs is their ability to take all these technologies very rapidly, these traditional business models and create new ones, thereby forcing a lot of financial institutions to up their game as well.
What fintech trend do you find most disturbing?
They're becoming easy conduits for financial crime. We do have a large amount of money that gets laundered through the financial services ecosystem. And as these companies are coming up, they're [potentially] creating new avenues for bad actors to move their money illegally through the system. … That technology is vulnerable to misuse by bad actors.
What's been your biggest professional blunder and what did you learn from it?
We believed there was a huge opportunity in transforming banks, helping them replace their systems that are aging and that were installed 30 years ago, and desperately needed to come up to speed. Our biggest challenge was that initially we took a kind of all-or-nothing approach. When the global financial crisis happened, basically, a lot of the discretionary money that banks had to do those types of transformations disappeared. They went into survival mode. What I learned from that is they want to be able to absorb change in bite-sized pieces. We had to go back to the drawing board and redefine how we were architecting our core banking system.
The disruptions of COVID-19 are driving banks to more digital account openings which creates opportunities for accelerating application fraud — and creates urgent new challenges for financial institutions. In this white paper, Early Warning® and Aite Group reveal how fraudsters exploit digital account opening and how banks can fight back.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday.
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