Though quick to embrace technology in its business, the financial industry has always felt rather separate from the wider tech sector. Stringent security requirements, arcane systems and a business dominated by a few enormous companies have kept out the smaller firms that often drive innovation. But that’s beginning to change, as banks realise that they need to play nice with others, and others realise that they can, at times, do without the banks.

“If you look around, whether it’s lending, asset management, or money transfer … we’re seeing specialist companies who are doing a much better job than the incumbent banks,” says Taavet Hinrikus, whose London-based company, TransferWise. “That’s happened in the last couple of years because consumers are fed up with their banks. At the same time, people are feeling safer about using the internet. I’m convinced we will see 30-40% of finance being done by new companies, similar to what we see in other industries.”

TransferWise is making inroads as a foreign exchange service, with a twist: it doesn’t exchange any money. Instead, it pairs people who want to get rid of a currency with those who want to get hold of it.

If Alice in the UK sends £10 to Bob in Ireland and at the same time Charlie in Ireland sends €12 to Diane in the UK, then the money doesn’t cross any borders at all; Charlie just sends his money to Bob, and Alice sends hers to Diane. That lets the firm slim its fees down to a minimal level, charging less than £5 to send £1,000 overseas.

Cutting fees is an obvious vector of attack for tech firms trying to muscle in on the financial sector, and it’s one that Robinhood takes as well. The US-based firm is aiming to take on stockbrokers with a shiny app, a ton of venture capital backing, and $0 fees on transactions.

It says that it manages that feat by “cutting out the fat that makes other brokerages costly”, such as “legacy technology, hundreds of storefront locations, and paper-based accounting” – though cash injections from the likes of Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz also allow them “the freedom to focus on building a wonderful brokerage experience rather than short-term profits”. But potential day-trader-millionaires needn’t worry.

The firm emphasises that its name “is not about ‘taking from the rich and giving to the poor.’ Instead, it’s about allowing everyone to fully share in the fruits of capitalism.”

Not everyone is competing on price, though. Stripe is attempting to win its share of the market by becoming a developer darling, making it easier than ever to integrate payments into apps and websites. It’s not cheap, charging slightly more than conventional card processors per use, but it makes up for that in simplicity: sites can add payments with as little as one line of code.

Anyone who’s had to deal with a bank for anything more than a basic savings account knows that simplicity can be as much of a selling point as price, and that’s what Stripe’s attempting to capitalise on. But the service, which bills itself as a “programming language for money”, can also handle complex, large-scale transactions, and has been used by firms including Twitter and Facebook.

But for the real programming language for money, it might be worth turning to something built in the internet age: bitcoin. And while Coinbase isn’t the oldest bitcoin firm, it is the company attempting to drag the cryptocurrency kicking and screaming into respectability. The company offers a range of services, from consumer wallets to developer tools, aimed at making bitcoin mainstream.

Bitcoin may have been born in the anti-government techno-libertarian milieu, but it doesn’t have to stay there. Turn it from the favoured currency of online black markets to the choice of firms trying to break the stranglehold of the credit-card processors, and it could be big business. “There’s now 10 merchants in the US with over a billion dollars in revenue who take Bitcoin,” says Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s chief executive. “At the beginning of this year, there were zero.”

No discussion of financial technology would be complete without mentioning the elephant in the room: Apple, whose Apple Pay service launched in the US last month. The service lets users pay for goods both online and, if they have a new iPhone, offline, with just a tap of their finger on the home button.

At first glance, the firm seems to be moving in the opposite direction to all the others, partnering with the banks rather than competing with them, and adding complexity to the system rather than simplifying it. But with the company’s £100bn cash reserves behind it, and the hardware in the pockets of almost 20 million users, it’s hard to bet against success. But it’s only the beginning of the revolution, not the end.