It's that time of year: review and predict. Here are 18 links of 2017 trends and 2018 predictions to ponder over the New Year holiday.

2017 in Review

Well, what else?

There is other FinTech news in banking and payments, but capital markets got most of the FinTech attention in the last week.

Even my favorite noncrypto FinTech story ended with a crypto note. Nearly 200 people attended the initial meeting of Chicago's FinTech Women (FTW), "The Future of FinTech is Female."

"If the current financial industry is to remain relevant, it must brace for a FinTech-tonic shift of unprecedented proportions," writes Jim Marous in the Financial Brand. "FinTech carries awesome potential for creative disruption, and the financial industry—the very creators of money—must manage this global dash towards both disintermediation and demonetization."

This week, the banking drama unfolds in three acts:

I.   Payments Possibilities
II.  Regulatory Ruminations
III. Lending Lessons

I. Top 10 trends in retail payments

How has the state punished the financial industry for its crimes,  corruption and anti-social behaviour?

By showering it with subsidies, privileges,  perks and by offering it protection from an angry public. And by reducing its profitability and capacity to change by piling new regulatory layers and requirements.

And this remains true not just of the UK and US. It is true of European countries as well.

There is no incentive to improve their behaviour.

This is another unavoidable lesson. Banking has not been reformed by actions taken by the state, central banks or regulators since the crisis. Indeed they have set back the prospects for improvement.

There were two main strands in the policy response to the crisis. One was monetary policy – the experiment in QE, discussed in Lessons 1-3. The other was regulatory.

Banking industry leaders have resisted all efforts to reform. That shows that in the current state of society, banking can be regulated – raising costs to society – but not restructured.

The original plan for this issue was to cover the main trends from last week's Money20/20 conference and get a sense of how banking, payments, and FinTech have evolved over the last year and what the year ahead looks like.

Collaboration between banks and FinTech startups came to focus as financial media expanded on the need for collaboration, and a blockchain summit provided some cogent examples.

"Since 2016, there has been a significant move from banks fearing start-ups and start-ups wanting to disrupt banks, to start-ups and banks working together in harmony," writes Chris Skinner in "FinTech Collaboration."

Two Banking Conferences Last week I split my time between two conferences focused on banking and FinTech: two very different worlds that have more common than not, as this series of quotes show.