7. The Idea Desert. We finished 2013 with a nagging realization: the innovation spark seems to have dimmed in financial services. This unsettling feeling was fostered by one too many startups with too-narrow a focus and one too many banks failing to come through on innovation promises, or maybe it was just the bitcoin rabble that convinced us that good ideas seem to be waning in fintech. We would argue that the last truly innovative fintech idea was most likely Stripe’s in 2010 – and its model has been co-opted by numerous other startups in the years since. Sadly, we don’t see any signs of a new outburst of fintech ideas in 2014, particularly since the major fintech providers seem to have stepped up their R&D noticeably.