What’s The Future Of Fintech?

In our previous post, we talked about how the new payment gateways are making it easier for thousands of companies to connect their customers with suppliers and acquiring banks and how finding a reliable supplier is vital to the success of your business.

Today we’ll discuss about the main topic that took place during the Future of Fintech conference last June 26, 2017. The event focused especially on the role that Fintech is developing and how it’s redefining the financial industry. In fact, the progress made is so important that they expect to see more technological advances in the next decade than any other financial technology in the last hundred years.

‘’Without data or information, businesses only have in their hands a mere opinion of their customers.”

According to the CEO & co-founder of CB insights, Anand Sanwal, ‘’Fintech is radically changing the business models and the way we handle money.’’ The main idea that he defends is that without data or information, businesses only have in their hands a mere opinion of their customers.

He reaffirms that ‘’it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, as long as you are able to get the data, analyze it and use it to understand who your customers are and where they spend their money. These are the must-have information that every business should study to evolve”.

How does this change affect startups?

We know that it is important to control the revenue generated and improve as a business, but we also know that it is more difficult than ever to stay on top. If we look at the graph below, we can see that everything moves very fast through the years and that the threats multiply when trying to launch a startup.

Moving our business upwards of this graph is no longer as simple as it was during the 60s or 80s. Unfortunately, we are nowadays playing in a market saturated with revolutionary ideas and businesses competing for being at the top making it harder for smaller brands to stand out or to reach their initial goals.

This progress not only changes the rules of the game but also forces suppliers and banks to make a difficult choice between adapting quickly to the new technologies and accepting the costs involved or losing the opportunity to grow in their sector.

That being said, and despite all the difficulties with which we find ourselves, Fintech is playing a major leading role in the industry. We have more alternatives to traditional banking and a large part is due to the innovations made and on being able to speed up and make the payment process somewhat less painful.

How Fintech is redefining customer experience

Fintech not only provides its customers with faster, more convenient and direct services at more affordable prices but also completely improves the buyer’s experience when purchasing an online product or service.

“For years we thought we knew our consumers, but not entirely true.”

Today’s digital customer experience goes far beyond a simple website. If we think about the Apps installed on users’ smartphones and tablets, we can see a clear example of how fast they have adapted to the changes. For them, having a safe and seamless service to make their purchases, is much more important than seeing a beautiful design on a web page.

Any company with resources can design a modern website and impress their users but, not all manage to provide an excellent user experience. Users now judge us for the credibility and simplicity of our payment platform. They are constantly looking for something fluid and that doesn’t bring them too many headaches.

In summary, having financial data, a great product and a well-designed website on hand are just not enough. We must be prepared for the future and adapt as quickly as possible to the arrival of these new technologies.

The future of the Fintech. What awaits us?

In addition to fostering innovation, Fintech’s role is to drive efficiency, growth, diversity and competition within the financial sector. For this to work, however, we must also ensure stability.

The closest goal is to enable small and large enterprises to evolve at the same pace as technologies and to provide them with an opportunity for both to benefit from the progress being made.

Although one cannot predict completely what the future of the Fintech will be, what we can say is that users are asking for big changes when it comes to payment methods. They are no longer willing to pay high commissions for money transfers or to buy their services or products online because they know that there are less expensive alternatives.

In the next 10 or 15 years, we expect to see a breakthrough in terms of security and authentication methods. It has long been a priority to guarantee the identity of the users and that is why we are seeing how banks have replaced the use of the conventional password with Fingerprint recognition or even the Iris scanning that has recently demonstrated to have better reliability.

We expect the technology to bring us new authentication methods that include biometric authentication and facial recognition as some companies such as HSBC did recently. But in addition to improving security, it is expected that in the coming year’s credit cards maintenance fees and other banking operations will disappear completely.

“The consumer in the future will be the one who always wins, he will have a more financial knowledge and better control over his expenses.’’

We can also see that millennials are used to embrace new technology and are more attracted to products that are mobile and more sceptical towards the traditional financial services industry. That is also the reason why big companies are using this information to their advantage to turn out some of the best marketing material targeted at Millennials.

As for data, we also hope to find new ways to collect information about our users and understand what they really need. The consumer in the future will be the one who always wins, he will have a more financial knowledge and better control over their expenses. Therefore, having this kind of information will allow us to approach them, offer a better personalization and ease their day.