FinTechs: The end of indecision

Recently, I was waiting for my flight from Heathrow back home to Vienna. Time to reflect on the Finovate 2017 conference I had just attended. I was really impressed with regard to the maturity of the solutions and ideas presented in London. After having seen 71 FinTechs, my personal list of "A+" content is 25 companies long.

Generally speaking, financial institutions will not have to fear FinTechs anymore (as if they ever did). But FinTechs are clearly the players to be reckoned with when we talk about transparency, speed, customer centricity and additional services helping the banking business models.

The following ideas really stuck with me:

• Banking as a Platform: The idea is not new, but what has been presented at the conference leads me to the conclusion that a Financial Institution now has the incredible opportunity to add a digital layer to their old legacy systems - adding products "off the shelf", and adding new business opportunities by opening up the platform etc.
• The Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD 2), coming into effect in January, 2018, is a major driver of innovation. Many applications had and continue to have PSD2 as one of their major drivers of change. This definitely has the potential to change the FS landscape in the next few years in Europe.

• Biometric Identification: I saw some interesting applications last year at Finovate in New York, but the maturity and additional safety layers presented make me believe that in the very near future we will access our accounts via fingerprint, voice or face recognition. It just makes life so much easier.
• Chatbots: Also not a new idea, but again much more mature, even to the point where banks do not have to develop their own Chatbots anymore, but have the possibility to access "Bot Platforms". See our CEO's chat with "Rose" below.
• SME services: Something I have been discussing with my clients because it just seems so logical to focus on this segment, since you can add value and charge nice fees. The applications and ideas "ready to use" at the conference in London should make every SME client very happy. They help the bank not only to generate higher sales, but also to add forward looking information, for example cash development to risk management and early warning systems.

• "Forward looking sales": Based on AI and machine learning algorithms, sales will become much more targeted, quicker and easier, hence leading to a higher number of what we used to call "cross-sales".
• Artificial Intelligence: AI is quickly becoming a buzzword. Personally, I believe machine learning will shake up many industries – but the FS industry will be particularly affected, since there are literally no production processes, only data handling. At Finovate, AI was mentioned as a backbone for many new applications, adding new services and pinpointing added value for clients. If done right, I see a very high chance of this becoming a gold mine.

To sum it up – it is becoming increasingly difficult for Financial Institutions to put arguments across like "yes, but... my legacy systems, my processes, the regulator…". This stops us from becoming more client focused.

We need an end to indecision. It seems all the solutions are out there – you don’t have to invent them, you only have to use them.