The latest 'World Retail Banking Report' from professional advisers Capgemini, based on interviews with thousands of retail banking customers around the world, included a series of questions on the fintech sector for the first time. According to Anirban Bose, head of global banking and financial services at Capgemini, and Vincent Bastid, Secretary General of Efma, who sponsored the publication, "the most startling insights to emerge from this survey have to do with the undeniable inroads fintech firms are carving into banking's core businesses."The global report observes that "retail banks have been eyeing the steady advance of fintech competitors for some time now"."Historically the large banks might have treated fintechs as outsiders," said Sharon Rode, banking industry practice leader at Capgemini Australia. "The trend that is now coming through is that banks are no longer seeing fintechs as competitors, but are starting to join forces with them through collaboration incubation, or acquisition in some cases, especially in digital banking."That said, Australia's reluctance to adopt fintechs into more mainstream banking over the last several years is reflected in the situation where the sector is very much in its infancy - compared to say the UK, where some peer to peer lenders have access to government backing."The banks see fintechs as being quite agile and innovative in niche areas," Rode says. And because banks have large customer bases what fintechs can do, is add that cognitive layer to give deeper understanding of the customers, allowing the bank to be ready to take proactive or reactive actions.However, the increase in the customer experience has not led to a commensurate improvement in the positive customer behaviour, constraining banks' abilitiesWith the emergence of fintech firms targeting different parts of the banking value chain, banks will be at a risk of losing their market share as these players disrupt the banking landscape.The threat of disintermediation is imminent, as globally almost two-thirds of the customers (63.1 per cent) are using financial products or services from a fintech; for Australia, it's slightly less, with 61.2 per cent customers using financial products or services from fintech. Capgemini Australia's  Sharon Rode said: "from our market understanding, we see more activity in the payments and cards space followed by loans, which includes unsecured loans and peer-to-peer."Rode further suggested that the higher percentage of customers claiming to be using products and services from fintech firms could be attributed to the use of wallets and other services used for making payments when customers are interacting with other industries (such as ecommerce, taxi aggregators etc, and where more and more customers are making payments using mobile wallets or using Apple Pay and Samsung Pay)."The question we asked the customers is as follows: Are you currently using any financial products or services from FinTech firms (such as Alibaba, Apple, Google, Lending Club, PayPal, Paytm, Prosper, Stripe, Square, Zopa, etc)?" she said.And although customers in Australia told Capgemini's researchers they have higher trust in their primary banks than a fintech firm, they also are more