We asked 9 execs at Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and JPMorgan what 'fintech' means to them. Here's why they say fintechs are friends, not foes.

Kabbage; Goldman Sachs; TD Ameritrade; Brex; Ruobing Su/Business Insider

• Business Insider asked executives at nine of the largest financial firms to define the word "fintech."
• While fintechs have largely been viewed as a threat and competition to traditional players, respondents largely dismissed that notion.
• Many say that fintechs initially went head-to-head with incumbents, but they now view them as partners.
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Fintechs are friends, not foes.

That, largely, was the takeaway from many of the nine people we surveyed from some of the world's largest financial institutions. We asked them one question: what is a fintech?

Often, fintechs are portrayed as the young, agile upstarts taking on the big incumbents, whether they be banks, asset managers, or brokerages. With lower overhead costs and a tech-first mindset, fintechs have marketed themselves as being able to respond faster to customer demands and disrupting the status quo.

But traditional players says that's no longer the case. Only one of the respondents used the word "compete" in their definition - Citi's Vanessa Colella - and it was to explain how fintechs used to be considered.

Instead, words like "collaboration" and "partner" were used to categorize how the Wall Street behemoths describe the term.

See responses from all nine people below. This is part of our broader survey of 43 execs at powerful Wall Street firms, hot startups, and big investors, who we asked to weigh in on the buzzy but hard-to-define term.