The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Rojers' News.

Have FinTech upstarts lost their mojo?

And will the one MBD scandal spur Malaysia's prime minister to reinvent himself as a general election lose?

These are the questions we'll be tackling on this

week's views room, a weekly conversation among breaking views columnists about the ups and downs of

the world of finance. I'm your host Jennifer Sabah, and with me as always is my co-host,

Anthony Curry. Hello, Anthony. Good day. All right, so America's largest banks have just had their best quarter in years that gives them more resources to throw it taking more of their business online and to combat the threat from the new players. So, Anthony, you've been looking at both sides of this debate, the traditional lenders and the fintech disruptors. And it seems that you're coming down on the side of the banks. I know it's terrible,

isn't it? I feel much shame. Although, to be fair, I'm not saying that all of these newer players

are going to fall by the wayside and disappear. I think what we're looking at here is that

the banks are now at a position where they have both got past the financial crisis and also

got enough financial wherewithal to invest. On top of that, they've been developing and testing

and are now ready to show a lot of the products they've got, which can compete with in many

respects and even do better than some of what the fintech players have been doing. Okay, so fintech

is a very broad definition.

Why don't you just kind of hit upon a few of the different types of companies that this

that comprise the sector? Yeah, so you got ones that you and I could possibly see, so the

lending clubs, the sofies of this world which do lending. You've got payments platforms,

some of which will know like PayPal, which also owns Venmo. You've

got Stripe, which is more, more does the plumbing for a lot of payments for businesses.

So it depends really where you want to look, of a very broad range of finance. I'm excluding

anything to do with investment banking. This is purely, I'm looking here purely at retail. Okay. So, you were recently in San Francisco for a big Fintech

conference. I mean, what was a feel? I mean, did you get the sense that a lot of these

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