How the digital surge will reshape finance

Thanks to covid-19, more people than ever are banking and making payments online

In 2012 david vélez tried to open a bank account in Brazil. “It was like going to prison,” he says. He was ordered to leave his belongings in a locker before walking through bulletproof doors. After waiting an hour, he faced a barrage of questions from a hostile manager. It took five months for him to be offered a bare-bones account costing him hundreds of dollars a year and a credit card charging an annualised interest rate of 400%. The next year, in the hope of eroding Brazil’s crusty banking oligopoly, he founded Nubank, a digital lender. By early 2020 the bank was valued at $10bn.

巴西的大卫形容2012年他去银行开户时就像去监狱一样，需要经过漫长的等待，繁杂的手续，而且信用卡的费率和利息都很高。次年，他成立了Nubank，一家数字贷款公司，希望能削弱巴西僵化的银行业寡头垄断。到2020年初，该银行的估值为100亿美元。

Then the pandemic came—and business really took off. This year alone the number of accounts at Nubank has risen by 50%, taking the total to 30m. In June it partnered with WhatsApp, which has 120m users in Brazil, to offer payments through the messaging service. In September it bought Easynvest, a digital broker, and launched operations in Colombia. In November Brazil will implement Open Banking, a reform that will give fintechs access to data held by banks, fund managers and insurers. All this, says Mr Vélez, is just the beginning of the digital revolution: “it is only the first second of the first half of the game.”

然后今年的新冠疫情爆发，银行的生意才真正开始。 仅今年一年，Nubank的帐户数量就增加了50％，总数达到了3000万。 今年6月，它与WhatsApp合作，后者在巴西拥有1.2亿用户-其通过消息服务提供付款服务。 9月份，Nubank收购了数字经纪人Easynvest，并在哥伦比亚开展业务。 巴西将于11月实施“开放银行”政策，这项改革将使金融科技公司能够访问银行、基金经理和保险公司持有的数据。 大卫说，所有这一切仅仅是数字革命的开始：“这只是游戏上半部分的第一秒。”

Just as a digital surge brought on by the pandemic is speeding up a transformation in retail and e-commerce, finance too is being reshaped. The shift from physical to digital payments this year has been dramatic. Pundits canvassed by The Economist reckon that the share of cashless transactions worldwide has risen to levels they had expected it to reach in two to five years’ time. In America mobile-banking traffic rose by 85% and online-banking registrations by 200% in the month of April.

正如疫情带来的数字浪潮正在加速零售和电子商务的转型一样，金融也正在重塑。 今年从实物支付向数字支付的转变是巨大的。 《经济学人》的权威专家们认为，全球无现金交易的份额已经上升到了他们预期在两到五年内才能达到的水平。 在美国，4月份移动银行业务量增长了85％，在线银行注册量增长了200％。

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