Money tech: a brief thought.
In 2019, the technology developed around money and the way we use it is startling. Not always in a good way.
The other day, at lunch, with a very biased group of technologically savvy people, I made a comment stating how I was fairly happy with my bank’s mobile application. This experience was not shared at all by those dear friends of mine. Their intense thoughts on how bad the situation was made me wonder, if the home banking experience is so difficult and painful for smartphone pro users, what must it be like for everyone else? Probably less than pleasant.
I got curious about this and I wanted to share some of the things I came across or thought about when I tried to have a look at the problem from an engineer’s perspective. From a technological perspective.
Similarly to the post from last week , I have the feeling we are once again talking about gaps. In fact, the asymmetry of insight into financials and into technology when considering different populations worldwide is severe. This unsettling but easy to observe state of affairs is very well illustrated by how people manage and interact with money. While crypto currency enthusiasts claim freedom from banks and democratised access to financial services, a significant percentage of the world’s population does not have an Internet connection, which is of critical importance for such alleged democracy. While trading, forex, hedge funds, leverage, shorts, and similar pieces of language are a commonplace for some, 1.7 Billion adults worldwide do not even have access to a traditional bank account [1] let alone being financially literate. Strikingly, even if you focus on the population from any one of the metropolis of the world, with prominent innovation hubs, universities and high tech companies it will be easy to find people that never had the chance of real contact with concepts such as digital currency or grasp the significance of digital privacy issues in this context.
Inequality, lack of opportunities, lack of access to high quality education and many other factors may help to explain the issues raised. However, the profound complexity of such factors entails a tremendously hard path towards achieving any kind of solution or mitigating strategy. However, as promised by the title, this reflection limits itself on technology and its role in the process.
One observation that called my attention to the home banking problem was the contrast between the quality and attention to detail that some entertainment applications exhibit and some critical applications (e.g. governmental apps, home banking apps, etc.) that struggle to provide basic “crash free” everyday use. It seems that the super fast, super cutting edge technological developments are not accompanied by their de facto application in many domains. An economic argument can always partially justify this and it is not expectable that every piece of innovation can be immediately applied for society’s benefit without potentially very high costs. However, a point could be made that the slow adoption of technology is linked to the limited capacity that we, as a whole, have to fully understand, integrate and accommodate all the tech changes being proposed (or, sometimes imposed).
Technology development is very fast, its adoption is fairly quick, but its deep understanding is very slow.
There is much to be done in the field of technology communication, but also in technology itself. It is not reasonable to think that, in the near future, everyone will be able to master the mathematical concepts and tools that allow to fully understand, for instance, how crypto currencies work under the hood. Actually, the cutting edge technology development supporting an entire crypto based industry is not really understood by, I risk to say with confidence, the majority of the population. Such situation renders some discussions incredibly hard to have at a political, economical, and societal level. Specially when opinions can be very conflicting. For example, while some focus on bitcoin’s neutrality [2], others only see a new space for ‘good old’ greed [3].
Considering all the, seemingly random, remarks of the previous paragraphs, the trending “fintech” word is actually, from my perspective, branding the very beginning of the story around money tech. I believe that only the first steps in the field were given and much to learn we still have. As technology developers and providers, it is important to keep pushing the limits of what can be done, provide wider applications of what has already been proven to work, and greatly improve our communication skills.
If technology fails to explain itself to the world we risk to deepen inequalities, risk to take incredibly bad political decisions, and potentially loose the benefits of some exciting new solutions.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/08/1-7-billion-adults-worldwide-do-not-have-access-to-a-bank-account-infographic/
[2] https://www.ccn.com/why-andreas-antonopoulos-2019-crypto-industry
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/15/blockchain-democracy-decentralisation-bitcoin-price-cryptocurrencies
