The Matrix Fintech Index announced that investments in fintech in 2021 could reach $100 billion. There are good reasons for this: in 2020, the industry grew by 97%. During this time, the most popular American index, the S&P 500, added only 14%. The index of companies providing classical financial services fell by 10% altogether.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the processes of universal digitalization, and the largest players were able to make many formats of financial transactions digital and massive, which became the point of the explosive growth of fintech.
We conducted market research in fintech, analyzed the main challenges of 2020 and identified 5 key fintech trends in 2021.
Embedded finance
Embedded finance is a new trend in modern financial technologies that integrates payments on loans, insurance, debit cards and investment instruments with almost any non-financial product. This is especially important for e-commerce, where profit and consumer loyalty depend on the speed of the transaction, as stated by Forbes.
Offline retail is also actively introducing new loyalty formats, offering hybrid debit and credit cards, in an effort to maintain a customer base and increase turnover. A customer in a store or at a special counter in 5 minutes can receive a retail chain card, which will allow him to shop now and pay later. This applies not only to loans but also to other financial instruments.
Tour operators and transport companies automatically offer several types of insurance at once when buying on the site (health, life, trip cancellation, animal, baggage loss, etc.) – the user only needs to confirm them and make a payment.
These solutions will increase the profits of banks and fintech companies and at the same time will stimulate healthy competition in both financial and other markets.
Big Data Management
Big Data is becoming a real value. The main source of this data is financial institutions: loan applications, debit cards, deposits, brokerage services, tax documents, bank statements, internal reports. This information can be used to identify important trends, potential risks, and informed strategic decisions.
Therefore, a deep understanding of data is essential to uncover hidden opportunities, optimize products and services, and automate business processes.
Fintech developers can significantly improve data processing by creating applications that will quickly and accurately extract information from any document or storage, analyze it and present it to the user in the required format and in an intuitive way. Nowadays, algorithms can easily deal with identifying different types of data and sorting them, but they often slow down when faced with difficult-to-read documents. Thanks to new fintech applications that will provide accurate recognition of an image, media file or text, a business will receive a reliable tool for analyzing current activities, predicting needs and risks, and making well-thought-out management decisions.
Digital Collaboration
According to the Gartner survey, 41% of employees expect to maintain remote working mode on an ongoing basis due to the pandemic situation. This means that financial institutions will need digital tools that provide secure access to files and facilitate collaboration with colleagues and counterparties. Paper documents must be converted to digital formats with a high level of accuracy and be accessible to remote users without compromising the integrity and reliability of the data and with automatic tracking of the history of changes.
Without a dedicated solution for viewing, editing and managing documents, users are forced to turn to third-party applications that can compromise data and increase the likelihood of a critical error.
Cryptocurrency
In 2020, many countries announced the possibility of the emergence of a digital currency, and some have already begun to develop it. Digital currency should increase resilience and healthy competition in the financial arena amid banks’ rivalry with tech companies and cryptocurrencies.
In addition, cryptocurrency has the potential to increase financial inclusion as it offers a payment infrastructure with lower transaction costs.
It will be easier for regulators to control the monetary sphere due to the programmability and transparency of the digital currency. Thus, the transition to a digital national currency is a matter of time, although there is no single approach to its use. So far, most projects are leaning towards internal use. By contrast, the European Central Bank, the central banks of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank are focused on the cross-border use of digital currencies.
RegTech
The business allocates impressive funds to meet all the regulatory requirements of the regulator. This is especially true for the financial sector, which the regulator looks at most closely. Therefore, financial organizations pay great attention to preventive measures to minimize the risks of losses and violations of the law.
Regulatory technologies (RegTech) are innovative technologies that allow companies to use advanced developments aimed at simplifying and accelerating the work of departments, as Deloitte states.
They automatically check every step for compliance with existing laws and regulations. With RegTech applications, banks and financial institutions can significantly reduce administrative costs, protect customers and ensure financial stability. In addition, new financial technologies provide speed, flexibility, scalability and end-to-end analytics tools.
With automation powered by Big Data and machine learning, RegTech is able to handle huge volumes of regulatory requirements every second for each business line. These automated solutions are programmed to continually explore and search for patterns found in large lakes of historical data. Thus, by using regulatory technologies, it becomes easier to identify problem cases or uncover fraud.
The development of fintech foreshadows the growth of financial literacy and wealth. It will also make businesses more successful and better manage their funds. Many traditional financial companies want to investigate fintech more closely, so it is worth starting work in this area now. If you are one of such companies, reach out to us – AIDA Research will assist you with market research of other fintech trends, solutions or development for your business.