Growth Opportunities Driven by Emerging Technologies in Financial Services—An IT Decision Maker Perspective, 2019

One of the most significant trends in the Financial services industry has been the emergence of FinTech. As technology transforms and disrupts the manner in which financial services are consumed and delivered to customers, new business models, pricing models, products, and services are emerging. Regulators have acknowledged the importance of the impact of technology on the industry, and the scope of stringent regulations is increasing to encompass the new stakeholders, offerings, and delivery models. As part of the FinTech programme, this research aims to understand how financial services companies are harnessing, or planning to harness, IoT, Blockchain, and AI to deliver business impact.

It provides an IT decision-maker perspective on the use of emerging technologies in financial services and these three technologies stand out amongst the emerging technologies of today and will have an increasingly transformational impact on the financial services sector over the next few years. They have already started to have make their presence felt in interdependent and synergistic ways. Distributed computing will expedite IoT deployment. An estimated 60 billion connected devices by 2024 goes hand in hand with a need for lower latency, greater cost efficiency, falling silicon costs, and demand for processing and analytics power at the edge.

The IoT also constitutes an essential source of quality, enabling data AI to address specific use cases of which there is a continually growing number across industries and value chains, from customer-facing through core operational processes to the back office. AI is expected to completely transform critical issues in the industry such as fraud detection, data security, and privacy. As customers’ expectations change, the trend is moving from a one-size-fits-all model to customized offerings. Blockchain provides secure storage and validation to ensure security and drive efficiency through automation.

The study covers the status of technology in the financial services industry, prevalent trends and use cases, and the business impact that IoT, AI, and Blockchain are expected to deliver. The survey delved deep into the progress achieved by financial services companies in their digital transformation journeys. The perceived benefits that respondents expect by deploying these technologies reflect the significant changes that the companies hope to achieve. As investment trends are revealed, respondents also share their concerns and challenges in adopting IoT, AI, and Blockchain.