Most of my adult life I had a savings account in one of the UK's major banks.
Banks provided an essential service to me, my wages had to be stored somewhere instead of under my mattress.
But over recent years, mainly since the 2008 market crash and following years of austerity, the more things have changed with the banks, mostly to our disadvantage.
My relationship with banks is no longer useful to me, it's all for their benefit!
I have closed all of my savings accounts and now invest a lot of my money in crypto, which I then stake for interest rates I could only dream of with a bank. I don't put all my eggs in one basket, I still invest in traditional stock markets and have a good dividend return rate every quarter. I also own an ISA.
But the current returns in the world of crypto are phenomenal, and we no longer have to rely on risky ICO releases with well established exchanges such as Binance giving such great returns.
There are very small or no fees to pay. Money moves instantaneously. We even have the emergence of pre paid or credit cards, giving all the benefits of traditional bank cards without the high fees. ATM's that convert crypto to fiat instantly, again with no or tiny charges.
What is keeping people with traditional banking? Fear of change and a lack of info for the general public regarding Defi and cryptocurrency are the main reasons. Can you imagine your Grannie investing in something as new, strange, and in many cases not well regulated such as crypto. No of course not.
But we do :)
And within less than a generation, maybe within as little as the next decade, we will see a mass move from the traditional banking methods, to mass adoption of DeFi.
Over the last two years alone, DeFi has grown from small scale, in the know blockchain FinTech use, into a huge number of platforms on blockchain through which you and I, borrowers, investors and now even lenders can make transactions without banks.
Most beneficially, Defi works in a way that is accessible to everyone in the world who has access to the internet via computers or ever cheaper and more powerful smartphones. They can store and transfer their money and access financial products in the same way as anyone else. All they need is a digital wallet you can download for free.
At the moment there are a few billion dollars tied up in DeFi, but with the potential of trillions of dollars in traditional finance moving to its uses, huge growth potential and the possibility of meaningful and profitable returns in a low interest rate world are starting to attract many newcomers.
If the banks don't accept, adapt and use it themselves it will finish them. They will try to block the tech advance (many already are, lobbying world governments) and they will try to corrupt it and use it to their advantage and screw us over again.
But I am a convert, I now many of the readers here are too. Lets spread the word, knowledge and the wealth!