A former Barclays CEO reinforced his warning that big banks may fall behind in the race towards harnessing new financial technologies like blockchain.
Antony Jenkins, who led the bank through a tumultuous period between 2012 and 2015, told CNBC that though banks tended to be good at innovating, they were struggling to transform in the way that outsiders were.
“I think what we see in all industries, especially in financial services, is that incumbents (banks) tend to be quite good at innovation – they throw a lot of resources at that – and then the transformation is much harder for them,” Jenkins told CNBC in an interview on Thursday.
He said that big technology firms and financial technology start-ups were dominating the space.
“If you look at all the interesting work on transformation, it’s really going outside the big incumbents. And the incumbents themselves are starting to realize this.”
On Tuesday, a report by the World Economic Forum found that banks were significantly lagging behind tech giants in the development of technologies like cloud computing, artificial intelligence and big data analytics. The study also concluded that fintech firms failed to disrupt the competitive landscape of the financial services in the way that they had hoped.
