There are reasons to think it will. Fintech automates complex processes, enabling disintermediation. It brings the intensive use of data and analytics giving the customer plenty better information, visibility, and access to choice. Fintech thrives on quite low barriers to entry and, mostly, has low capital requirements, suggesting there will be lots larger competition in some areas.

Already, in terms of price added, one of the most necessary fruits of fintech has been the marriage of finance and mobile telephony that is bringing the most critical financial offerings – reliable payments and safekeeping – to the developing world. Payment structures are subject to a lot of fintech activity everywhere. The lower price technology will win, although the value proposition of the Bitcoins of the world is arguably much less compelling than that of the Mpesas.

Peer-to-peer is an exemplar of what fintech does well – superbly designed software program places savers directly in contact with borrowers, informing the decisions of each in a transparent information environment, disintermediating incumbent banks, and helped, at the start at least, by means of light regulation.

But the evolution of peer-to-peer is informative. Uptake is perhaps slower than expected. Some, like Lending Club, have stumbled. Most significantly (the more agile) incumbent banks are responding by embracing the technology and the start-ups that are driving it. So peer-to-peer may also maintain its promise to transform SME financing, whilst leaving the institutional landscape not so modified as we may expect. This, after all, is what has happened in retail. Some retailers have disappeared and are continuing to disappear, however others have adapted and are better for it.

Fintech has the capability to drive cost out of the finance enterprise and effectivity in: however to what extent? Be cautious what you wish for – after all, Philippon’s transactions charges are people’s salaries and jobs.