From a UX perspective there's one great service that the banks provide and that is identity managament.
In my opinion this is the main reason why things like cryptocurrencies have not taken off, and that is because their identity & fraud management truly sucks.
There's no person to talk to when you loose your access keys or forget a pin/password.
It's extremely hard to automate all that purely in software, and the very few that have succeeded in managing it(i.e. apple & google) have leveraged their hardware infrastructure plus partnerships with telecom providers and all their physical braches.
Yes old-school banks are inconvenient, can be hell to deal with, however it's very hard to scale fraud when you need to physically show up in person at a branch and I feel like this factor is very underappreciated.
For me it's that they're CDIC insured and government regulated. The Government of Canada would have to collapse in some apocalyptic event for me to lose the money in my accounts.
They're also very stable (the regulated Canadian ones at least).
Cryptocurrencies (or at least Bitcoin) has this major flaw/feature that if you fuck up (mistake or get hacked), which happens to everyone, eventually, there are no reversing/chargebacks possible...
In my opinion this is the main reason why things like cryptocurrencies have not taken off, and that is because their identity & fraud management truly sucks.
There's no person to talk to when you loose your access keys or forget a pin/password.
It's extremely hard to automate all that purely in software, and the very few that have succeeded in managing it(i.e. apple & google) have leveraged their hardware infrastructure plus partnerships with telecom providers and all their physical braches.
Yes old-school banks are inconvenient, can be hell to deal with, however it's very hard to scale fraud when you need to physically show up in person at a branch and I feel like this factor is very underappreciated.