Rebranding Failure: Why Every Bank Now Calls Itself a Fintech

The global banking sector has discovered a revolutionary way to seem innovative without changing anything: call itself fintech.

Across continents, banks are swapping marble lobbies for digital buzzwords, hoping to convince the world that their decades-old infrastructure is suddenly disruptive. According to Bloomberg, more than 70 percent of major financial institutions now describe themselves as “technology companies that happen to offer banking.” The BBC called it “the greatest act of corporate rebranding since Facebook became Meta and did exactly the same thing.”

The motivation is clear. Fintech startups are cool, funded, and unburdened by trust. Banks are stable, regulated, and deeply allergic to adjectives like agile. The solution was obvious, pretend to be each other.

The Guardian reports that the global fintech sector is worth over $300 billion, even though most users can’t explain how it differs from online banking. Meanwhile, traditional institutions have realized that innovation costs money, but rebranding is cheap.

Welcome to the financial version of a midlife crisis. The banks have discovered sneakers and hoodies.

From Branches to Buzzwords

The first rule of modern banking is that technology is easier to market than competence.

Bloomberg Intelligence found that banks are spending billions on “digital transformation initiatives,” a phrase that usually means renaming their mobile app and adding darker shades of blue to the logo. Executives promise “cloud-first ecosystems,” “AI-driven personalization,” and “seamless omnichannel banking experiences.” None of these phrases actually mean faster service or lower fees.

The Wall Street Journal reported that several global banks have launched internal fintech incubators to “foster innovation.” In practice, this means a small office filled with beanbags, whiteboards, and junior employees trying to explain blockchain to senior executives who still print their emails.

One bank in London rebranded its mortgage division as “PropTech Finance.” Another in Singapore now calls its savings accounts “digital liquidity platforms.” A European bank went viral on social media after introducing “Bank-as-a-Service” to describe… regular banking.

The Guardian called it “a linguistic arms race where words move faster than progress.”

Meanwhile, the fintechs these banks are imitating are quietly struggling. According to Reuters, venture funding for fintech startups fell by 45 percent in 2024, forcing many of them to partner with the very banks they were built to disrupt. The result is an industry that has merged rebellion with bureaucracy.

The BBC summarized it neatly: “Banks want to be fintechs. Fintechs want to be banks. Nobody wants to be customers.”

Innovation by PowerPoint

If disruption can’t be built, it can at least be presented. That is the philosophy behind every financial technology summit this year.

Bloomberg covered the Global Fintech Leadership Forum in Zurich, where executives from legacy institutions spent two days declaring their commitment to innovation while displaying slides from 2019. Every panel included the words “digital,” “trust,” and “ecosystem,” often in that order.

The Wall Street Journal described it as “a networking event for banks to reassure each other that they are still relevant.”

Corporate innovation teams have become performance art. Banks announce AI partnerships to streamline processes they could have fixed in 1998. They launch pilot programs to test digital currencies no one plans to use. And they hire “Chief Transformation Officers,” whose main job is to rename things until they sound futuristic.

One European bank introduced an “AI-powered customer empathy algorithm.” Reuters later revealed it was a rebranded chatbot with polite grammar.

At another institution, an internal memo proudly declared, “We are no longer a bank. We are a digital ecosystem for financial empowerment.” The next page contained instructions for how to fax compliance documents.

The Guardian quoted a fintech consultant who said, “Legacy banks are like aging rock stars—they want to reinvent themselves, but they keep playing the same songs, only louder.”

Even the design language reflects the illusion of progress. Logos are now minimalist, websites use startup fonts, and LinkedIn posts come with words like “synergy” and “velocity.” Yet the average loan approval time remains unchanged. The technology has evolved; the bureaucracy has not.

The Great Data Delusion

At the heart of the fintech rebranding movement lies the belief that more data equals more intelligence. Banks have mountains of it. They just don’t know what to do with it.

Bloomberg reports that traditional institutions collect petabytes of customer information but use less than 15 percent of it effectively. The rest sits idle in compliance databases, occasionally accessed to produce colorful charts during investor presentations.

To mask this inefficiency, banks have begun calling themselves “data-driven organizations.” The BBC interviewed a senior data officer who admitted, “We don’t know what half our data means, but it sounds modern to mention it in meetings.”

Meanwhile, fintech startups that once promised to “democratize finance” are quietly turning into data brokers, monetizing the same customer information they claimed to protect. The Guardian describes this as “surveillance capitalism with a friendlier font.”

Even regulators are playing along. Reuters reports that several governments now categorize banks and fintechs under the same “digital financial services” umbrella. The distinction between innovation and imitation has officially dissolved.

The irony is that the more banks digitize, the less human their service becomes. AI now decides creditworthiness, chatbots replace customer support, and algorithms handle complaints by apologizing faster than humans ever could. The Wall Street Journal notes that satisfaction scores have dropped even as “digital engagement metrics” have soared.

The future of banking may not be fintech after all, it may just be faster frustration with better branding.

Conclusion

Banks have always been slow to change, but they have become remarkably quick at pretending to. In 2025, innovation is no longer measured by new products but by new adjectives.

Bloomberg calls this trend “the financial theater of transformation.” The BBC describes it as “legacy institutions LARPing as startups.” Both are accurate.

By calling themselves fintechs, banks hope to borrow some of the cultural credibility they lost during the last decade of scandals and regulation. But style cannot replace substance. No amount of branding can disguise the reality that most of these institutions still run on mainframes older than their interns.

The Guardian argues that this rebranding frenzy reflects something deeper, a collective fear of irrelevance. The fintech revolution was supposed to disrupt banks. Instead, it inspired them to rebrand their inefficiency as innovation.

As one consultant told Reuters, “If you can’t fix the system, at least rename it until investors stop asking questions.”

And that may be the truest definition of fintech in 2025: not financial technology, but financial theater. A performance of innovation, streamed live from the same old cubicles, with slightly better Wi-Fi.