You understand that financial technology means… financial technology.
There isnt a clear definition or origin of the phrase, which has oddly enough lead to a paper being made to determine an appropriate definition. The following definition was was concluded:
Fintech is a new financial industry that applies technology to improve
financial activities.
The author does note the difficulties though
The overall claim of this article is that no one single definition of Fintech exists. After
more than 40 years that the term has been used in practice as well as literature there is
no agreement as to what Fintech entails. The process of deriving a shared language for
business phenomena has long been recognized to be a daunting task (Daft and
Wiginton, 1979). By demonstrating elusiveness of Fintech as a concept this paper
corroborated this assertion. The differences in definitions revealed by the literature
review, underscore that there are definitional problems with Fintech. This is often
compounded by the interchangeable use in the practice, but also in scholarly literature
The wikipedia article you link is a good example of how the wikipedia can be a poor source, since it sources a definition through research then tries to narrow down the definition by using the huffington post as a source (huffington post is what you’ve used as your definition).
Yes, cash machines would be a new industry that applies technology to improve financial activities. At the time they were implemented they would absolutely be fintech in my mind. they wouldn’t be modern fintech now though.
Same with first direct and internet banking in general, they are fintech, sure, but not new anymore and now well established, so we could say they dont come under the umbrella of modern fintech.
first direct haven’t seen do much recently, but i haven’t payed attention. If we are to apply ‘fintech’ to banks as a whole, then the likes of Barclays and Lloyds are fintech banks.
The problem here is you’re attempting to control ‘fintech’ to “new” banks, which would then exclude new technologies from existing banks. Take cheque imagine for example. This isnt a fintech because its been deployed by Lloyds and not Monzo? That’s clearly not true, so to suggest that fintech is exclusive to new companies would be erroneous.