FinTech is rapidly evolving with the potential to disrupt many parts of the financial sector. The growth of financial technology companies in recent years has been astonishing. The technologies like AI, robotic process automation, smart contracts, DeFi, and virtual reality are all on the rise and organizations are taking aggressive action to determine how they can use these technologies within their ecosystems.
In my opinion, the financial technology sector is red-hot at the moment, with traditional financial institutions increasing their fintech investments and competing with startups to offer financial services products faster and more efficiently.
Let us take a look at some fintech trends that are projected to influence financial services in 2022:
1) Mobile Payments and Digital Banking Services: Mobile Digital banking offers improved customer experience and delivers faster and more efficient services. Neobank is the leader to disrupt the FinTech landscape with its new type of online banking operations with mobile-first design principles.
Customers can open an account through an app on their smartphone instead of making the trip to a physical branch or filling out endless paperwork in paper format. Such apps feel more user-friendly, and most of them offer a wide range of banking features, including savings accounts, loans for customers’ cars or mortgages, along with easy payments and remittances.
The good news is that digital banking is not just about going paperless and cashless -- the underlying technologies have substantially contributed to the shift from a centralized traditional banking model to a more distributed, technology-driven one.
2) White Label FinTech: In a nutshell, white-label products are manufactured by a provider to be rebranded before they are sold. Finance management has a lot of complexities. White label fintech solutions allow businesses of all sizes to easily create a global payment gateway. It is an actual win-win since it provides the distributor with a larger customer base and minimizes initial launch costs for the reseller.
As tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google deepen their financial services plays, banking, and personal finance tools have become a prime opportunity for fintech and smaller firms to leverage private labeling to compete, and for established players to unlock new revenue streams.
3) Voice-Enabled Payments: Voice-enabled technology allows people to use their smartphone’s voice recognition software and a digital assistant like Siri, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa to hear their balance and make payments or money transfers.
There is an opportunity for the technology to be used for payments in retail stores with no contactless payment terminals. It also aids those with visual impairments in gaining access to the cashless economy. Examples of transfer service companies that align with voice-enabled payments include Venmo and PayPal.
4) Blockchain Technology: Blockchain is undoubtedly the most significant financial innovation for digital transactions because its management is distributed, which means it cannot be controlled by a specific individual, company, government, or bank. Although companies worry about the security issues of this cutting-edge FinTech, Blockchain’s growing acceptance as a way to create a secure digital ledger cannot be ignored.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are only two examples of how blockchain might change the world of finance.
5) Open Banking: Open banking allows banks to connect third-party APIs to their own banking platforms. Customers can share their financial data with third parties in return for new services and modifications to make existing information better. For example, customers may grant access to a utility company app to pay bills directly from their bank account instead of having one more login and payment method on file.
Other known use cases of open banking include Account Aggregation, Personal Finance Management, Instant Credit Risk, Subscription Management, and opening new accounts.
Digital strategy, access to data, and functionalities that a bank or financial institution is giving are what define Open Banking.
There are close to 20+ trends that are revolutionizing the FinTech Landscape, I would cover some like Cybersecurity, AI & ML, Biometric Security, Autonomous Finance, Smart Contracts in my next article. Do watch this space, if interested!
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