Celent’s 2018 Model Bank awards winners provide strong evidence that financial institutions are innovating rapidly, and the pace of innovation has picked up. Our list of winners is dominated by established, multichannel, depository-based financial institutions. It is mostly established, ‘legacy’ banks that are having the most success. We have one challenger bank among this year’s winners, but 2017 was a year of transition for challenger banks. Successful digital-only banks are still the exception, not the rule. In fact, Fintech in general, although alive and well, is starting to show cracks. Many Fintech’s have pivoted their messaging from disrupting banks to partnering with them, i.e., being just an IT vendor not a competitor. In 1985 Bill Gates famously said, “banks are dinosaurs, they will be disrupted”. Banking certainly continues to have its challenges, but even the dinosaurs lasted for centuries.