Bluevine will double down on its effort to become a one-stop-shop for SMB financial services, raising $102.5 million to expand its suite of business banking products.
Bluevine’s approach is quite different from what conventional wisdom dictates is the default fintech strategy.
Many fintech influencers speak about fintech as an opportunity to de-bundle financial services.
While major banks sought to sell the same customer on many products, we were supposed to rethink finance and go to one provider for lending, another for robo-advising. We would use technology to combine the “best of breed.”
However, reality hasn’t lived up to the promise.
Why hasn’t the “de-bundle and integrate” strategy worked?
Regulation is a big part of it, but so is the fact that acquiring customers in fintech is relatively expensive.
So Bluevine is going its own way, responding to the fact that SMBs are poorly-served by major financial institutions.