Steve Case penned an opinion item this week in The Wall Street Journal where he noted in part that, “As the presidential candidates shift toward the general election, voters will hear divergent plans to address the problem of ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions. The real threat to Wall Street, however, doesn’t come from politicians, but from startups that are disrupting financial services at an unprecedented pace.

“Last year, investment in financial technology (FinTech) startups that aim to transform the industry rose to nearly $14 billion, according to American Banker. As they gain customers, the megabanks will lose ground. ‘Too big to fail’ also often means too clumsy to innovate. Already these institutions are finding themselves playing defense. Innovative blockchain technology—the magic behind Bitcoin—could drive further decentralization and disruption.”

Meanwhile, Andrew Ross Sorkin reported in yesterday’s New York Times that, “If you spend more than 15 minutes with any senior executive of a large bank these days, it is almost impossible not to hear the phrase ‘fintech’ uttered. It is usually spoken with a sense of optimism, but sometimes with a sense of dread.”

The Times article stated that, “The promise of all these new technologies is to fundamentally disrupt the biggest players in finance. Companies like Stripe, a payments company, hope to become replacements for PayPal and others. Lending Club wants to make getting a loan cheaper and easier. Wealthfront wants to advise you and manage your money from your phone. And, of course, Bitcoin and its many derivatives wants to be the new gold, or better yet, digital cash.

“If they succeed, Wall Street as we know it may become an outpost of Palo Alto. According to a Citigroup report last week, fintech may be on the cusp of an ‘Uber moment,’ as Antony Jenkins, the former chief executive of Barclays, predicted last year. Some 800,000 people will have lost their jobs at financial services companies to some of the newly dreamed up software in a decade, the report said. ‘Roughly 60 to 70 percent of retail banking employees are doing manual-processing-driven jobs,’ the report explained. ‘If all the current manual processing can be replaced by automation, these jobs can disappear or evolve.’

“The ripple effects are enormous: Consider not just the employees but the impact on commercial real estate, for example, if banks shut their coveted branches on the corners in major cities.”

Nonetheless, yesterday’s article added that, “Others are less convinced. Wall Street denizens like the banking investor J. Christopher Flowers have declared that the fintech frenzy is simply that: hype that defies common sense and will leave a trail of failed companies in its wake.

“A third view may have the highest likelihood of coming true: The big banks, so powerful and yet so anxious about the possibility of being disrupted by the upstarts, will gobble them all up in a spate of mergers and acquisitions that puts the disrupters squarely inside the institutions they were supposed to overtake.”

Recall that The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Bank of America was “abandoning its no-deals policy and going shopping in Silicon Valley…In a push to upgrade its technology offerings, the Charlotte-based lender is dispatching a top executive out west to look at possibly scooping up promising startup companies.”

And Liz Moyer reported in yesterday’s New York Times that, “Finance is where they built their careers. Now some of banking’s former stars are pouring millions of dollars — and in some cases staking their careers — into new technologies that are shaking up everything from lending to payments to investing…[T]hey are part of a wave of investors who sank $17.8 billion into financial technology, or fintech, in the first nine months of 2015, an 88 percent increase from the same period in 2014, according to a new report by Accenture. The three top technologies were cloud, mobile and analytics, the report said.

“A separate analysis by Citigroup put total fintech investing for all of last year at $19 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2010.”

Wall Street Journal writer James Hookway reported this week that, “Gartner Inc. now ranks Vietnam among the top five providers of IT outsourcing services in Asia—alongside China, India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka—up from 30th place in 2010.

“The consultancy described the country, in a survey released in February, as a low-cost option for international firms where English usage has improved in recent years.

“Local programmers and developers already are stepping up their game. More than 100,000 businesses registered websites in 2013, according Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications’s latest data, up 170% from the previous year.”

The Journal article added that, “Its high-school students ranked 12th in the world in science and mathematics in an OECD survey last year, compared with the U.S.’s ranking of 28th.

“Even though the country has the innovation and skills to produce more homegrown companies, it has to do a better job of marketing itself to bring in more venture-capital investment, [Truong Gia Binh, chairman of FPT] said.

“Google parent Alphabet Inc. recently announced plans to train 1,400 engineers in the country as part of a social outreach effort. Google CEO Sundar Pichai visited the country while on vacation in December and attended a forum with Vietnamese tech entrepreneurs. He said local startups could achieve global success in large part due to rising Internet use and a strong entrepreneurial culture. Speaking to about 200 people at a local cafe in central Hanoi, Mr. Pichai said he didn’t see any reason why Vietnamese companies couldn’t follow their counterparts in India and China.”

Mr. Hookway also noted that, “Vietnam’s government also has eased on laws allowing for faster registration of new technology companies.”

Recall that Slack was the subject of an article in the Los Angeles Times in February, which noted in part that, “Just two years in, and Slack has raised $340 million in venture capital, boosted its head count to 369 and snagged 2.3 million daily active users, 675,000 of which pay for the service.”

Deborah Gage, writing in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, reported that, “Slack Technologies Inc. is bucking a trend of faltering Silicon Valley startups.

“As startups go, Slack has ridden a meteoric rise by attracting legions of people who message one another at work. The company, whose app is used in large part by businesses to exchange messages and share files, has raised $200 million at a post-money valuation of $3.8 billion.”

The Journal article explained that, “The number of Slack users has also grown, from 500,000 users of its free service in February 2015 to more than 2.7 million. The company has 800,000 paid users. Slack tries to hook workers on its free service and then persuade their bosses to pay for a version with more features.”

Saturday’s article added that, “Slack’s goal now is to turn its software into a platform that integrates so much other software that workers will want to spend their entire day there. To stoke that mission, Slack in December announced an $80 million investment fund for developers to build apps that integrate with Slack.”