This month, a TV drama, about a real-life event, caused a massive public outcry in the UK. The show, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, retells the story many people consider one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting due to a defective IT system.
The dramatisation, which focuses on one of the many court cases to emerge from the scandal, has dominated public discourse in the UK since its broadcast at the start of the year. It even diverted the UK prime minister Rishi Sunak from his 2024 campaign to keep his job to comment on the over 20-year-old scandal.
Most strikingly, a common reaction from shocked viewers was surprise: ‘Why did no one know about this gross miscarriage of justice before?’ But the fact of the matter is that this scandal was well known and covered extensively in the press. UK publications like Private Eye, Computer Weekly and even the Financial Times reported on the IT problems and the Post Office’s failure to manage it. The BBC’s Panorama, a current affairs show, dedicated an episode to the story in 2022. Meanwhile, BBC’s Radio 4 produced a 17-part podcast on the subject — The Great Post Office Trial — which ran in 2023.
A book, The Great Post Office Scandal, written by Nick Wallis (who also hosted the Radio 4 podcast) was published in November 2021.
But it took a four-part, fictionalised TV show to light the flame of outrage in the British public.
This got me thinking about how we predict impact, measure quality, and the stories we pay attention to.
At the start of the year, HSBC announced Zing, an international money application in the vein of Revolut and Wise, available to non-bank customers. (You knew I’d connect this back to fintech somehow.) The LinkedIn thought leader content warriors came out in full force.
Reactions ranged from the bog standard ‘Excited to see this launch!’ to the informative ‘HSBC quietly hired from Revolut, Monzo and Wise for new fintech rival’, to the sneering ‘It’s a bull in a china shop!’. (Well, HSBC is one of the largest banks in the world.)
Some even had a go at the name: ‘Zing? Really?’
This is my take. (Full disclosure, I am a regular and happy customer of Wise).
When new fintech companies exploded on the scene, many people justifiably frustrated with the slow pace of digital change at many banks predicted that the superior quality of products, developed in the agile, open source, lean start-up environment would tip the scales of customer loyalty and market share in their favour. However, as any start-up founder knows, finding that product market fit and gaining market share as quickly as possible is the key to sustainability, longevity, and profitability. But what incumbent banks have had, have always had, whether they release poor or quality products, is that market share.
The fintech revolution, which arrived along with the rise of smartphones, open-source development and easy-to-use technical building blocks, has improved the quality of financial services applications. But it hasn’t really made a noticeable impact on market share. In The Banker’s list of the Top 1000 World Banks there are but a handful of new challenger banks on the list — the UK’s Monzo and Brazil’s Nubank among them. But the top of the ranking is still dominated by the likes of banks such as HSBC.
In the early days of the internet, I used a new, independent web browser called Netscape. My boss told me to stop using it because Microsoft was about to launch theirs and it would crush this upstart. I was annoyed, but he was right. (He was right for a moment; this was before Google raised its massive head.)
The likes of Wise and Revolut are massive powerhouses in the fintech space, which works in their favour. But they still pale in comparison to the global reach a bank like HSBC commands. Does that mean Zing is a better product than newer offerings? Consumer feedback will determine that. Is the HSBC-produced Zing in a better position to reach millions of customers, globally, in a very short space of time? Most of us know the answer to that one.
Although the UK Post Office scandal has been covered in the press for years, the story slipped under many people’s radars unless they were specifically interested in IT failures or the lives of people who run rural outposts of the Post Office. It took a network TV channel to reach the people who never thought they would care about private finance initiatives, IT mismanagement or the lives of 555 sub-postmasters.
The producers of Mr Bates vs The Post Office thanked Mr Wallis, the journalist who has written and broadcast extensively on the UK Post Office scandal, for inspiring them to create the TV show. I’m not sure the founders of Wise or Revolut would accept such a thank you from the team behind Zing.
Fintech is getting interesting in 2024.
You can connect with Liz on LinkedIn, or follow her on Bluesky.
Register to sign up to the Digital journeys newsletter, as well as the four other pillar newsletters that constitute The Banker.
