It’s time to disrupt “disrupt”
As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, language and messaging are crucial to long-term success. Being able to deliver the right value proposition to the right audience at the right time is a skill that frequently separates those who get funded (or close their first customer, establish a key partnership, etc) from those who don’t.
Fintech as an industry, though, has a problem with language: namely, we don’t have one.
The word “fintech” itself illustrates the problem. It’s a combination of the words “financial” and “technology”, and while the two words blend nicely into a shorthand slang word that rolls easily off the tongue, the two different groups that it joins together frequently have trouble communicating with each other.
It’s not difficult to see where that disconnect comes from. Innovators who come from a technology background (particularly young innovators who create start-ups) are pushed to adopt the language that venture capitalists like to hear. They are rewarded for creating pitches that sound similar to the pitches other successful technology companies have used in the past, regardless of whether those success stories operate in finance or other areas altogether. An elevator pitch that includes words and phrases like “disrupt”, “hockey stick growth”, “gamification” or “the Uber of X” tends to play well in the tech community. Even if some people roll their eyes at the obvious use of buzz words (Finovate Bingo, anyone?), enough companies use this type of language to describe themselves that it’s clear that these words and phrases still resonate with those who decide what companies get funded and what companies don’t.
The financial industry, needless to say, has an entirely different set of language that stem from a very different source of motivation.
To read more, please click on the link below…
