Technologies shaping the future of fintech

fintech report

The technologies shaping the future of fintech

As fintech further embeds itself in life and industry, eolas examines the technologies that will both enable and define the sector over the coming decade.

Artificial intelligence

It is estimated that AI can generate up to $1 trillion additional value for the global banking industry per annum. Automatic factor discovery is expected to become more prevalent in financial services as a means of modelling, with knowledge graphs and graph computing also expected to play a significant role. These elements will build associations and identify patterns across complex financial networks and disparate data sources, vastly affecting the sector in the years to come.

Blockchain

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) allows the recording and sharing of data across multiple stores; some DLTs utilise blockchain technology to store and transmit data. DLTs are expected to underpin ecosystem financing by storing transactions in multiple places at one time. A Bank for International Settlements 2021 survey found that 60 per cent of central banks are testing or studying central bank digital currencies; China, for example, has begun trial on a digital currency that is based on a permissioned DLT.

Cloud computing

McKinsey and Company research states that by 2030, cloud technology will account for earnings before tax, interest, depreciation and amortisation of over $1 trillion across the top 500 global companies. They predict that banks will recognise “the potential to adopt cloud-based microservice architecture at scale in the next few years, where application programming interfaces (APIs) unlock machine- to-machine communication and allow services to scale independently without needing to enlarge the coding base of the overall offering”.

Internet of Things

As environmental governance considerations govern financial institutions more and more, carbon trading is predicted to be increasingly indexed to IoT measurements, while insurers are increasingly using IoT to determine risk, improve customer engagement, and accelerate and simplify the underwriting and claims process. In banking, IoT-based inventory and property financing are expected to refine risk management by ensuring that accounting records match real-world transactions.

Open source and software-as-a-service

Open source software, serverless architecture and SaaS have all become key components in the launching of new fintech ventures. SaaS allows companies to use software as needed, with no obligation to own or maintain it; serverless architecture removes the need for companies to run their own servers and also reduces costs as charges for executed software code are not incurred as often; and open source allows companies to rapidly scale up using code that is free of charge.