Fintech- The Future of Finance?

The combination of Finance and Technology—commonly known as Fintech—is revolutionizing the way financial services are provided. The availability of the Internet and smart phones are making it possible to take most of the financial services digital. This new way of meeting customers’ needs is putting enormous pressure on incumbents. Banks are under pressure to provide digital services. But their age-old legacy system is a big problem. In this circumstances, using smart technologies, start-ups are disrupting the financial services markets by offering smart solutions such as crowd funding and P2P lending to satisfy customer needs better and cheaper.

This is equally true for payment, investment, as well as insurance businesses. Apart from digital currency such as Bitcoin, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a promising unprecedented change to change entire financial ecosystem altogether. In order to cope with this pressure, many financial service providers, including banks, are already busy transforming their services to compete with the new entrants. More often than not, they are cooperating with start-ups to share innovations in the financial services markets. 

However, some key questions remain: How will this transformation revolutionize the financial services market? How are the new technologies disrupting the existing business models? How are the incumbents accommodating disruptive technologies? How will various players including governments use the innovations such as Distributed Ledger Technology? Will they create more social divisions or help them to offer more inclusive services?