The French revolution took a while to get going in earnest. After the storming of the Bastille kicked off proceedings in 1789, it was three years before the guillotine entered service. Then things really accelerated: Louis XVI lost his palace, then his head, and Maximilien Robespierre’s reign of terror ensued – until the radical-in-chief got the chop himself in 1794.
How safe are members of the UK’s banking establishment from the much-trumpeted fintech revolution? Just a few years ago, the outlook for these venerable incumbents was looking decidedly unsettled. Upstart startups such as Atom, Monzo, Starling and Tandem were aiming not only to compete with them, but to beat them.
Even the normally understated Deloitte was warning that the big high-street players would struggle to shrug off this threat to their dominance, as they’d done so many times before. In its 2014 research report, Banking Disrupted, the firm’s banking leader in the UK, Zahir Bokhari, wrote: “Deloitte sees this time as being truly different. Banks’ core competitive advantages over new entrants are being eroded.”