The FinTech industry continues to see dramatic growth and innovation, with multiple technologies disrupting the financial services landscape. The increasingly digitalised and cashless world continues to elevate the speed of progression of technologies, with new solutions becoming a necessity for businesses to leverage in order to meet their goals.

We discuss the key trends emerging in the industry, as a result of this growth and innovation:

Embedded finance is set to transform the world of FinTech

Embedded finance is revolutionising the future of FinTech and redesigning the financial services industry, through the integration of financial services with non financial service providers. According to Lightyear Capital, embedded finance will generate $230 billion in revenue by 2025, with the prediction for this to increase to a $7 trillion industry in 10 years.

Companies incorporating embedded finance functionality will see increased revenues and improved customer retention and loyalty, by streamlining the banking and payments experience for their consumers, and removing the traditional pain points that are experienced in a transaction. Additionally, this will allow businesses to build and launch financial products without the typical development and compliance costs, reflecting an improved process for both the company and consumer.

Technology examples include Finix, who offer a payments management solution, allowing companies to build and scale their payments infrastructure. Secondly, MatchMove, who’s platform enables ‘Banking-as-a-Service’ and the capabilities of spend, send, lend within any app, allows customers to spend both online and offline via instantly issued prepaid cards on major card networks.

Greater emphasis on compliance and financial crime standards

The FinTech sector saw dramatic growth throughout 2021, which resulted in heightened financial crime standards, and an increasing demand for compliance and cybersecurity solutions.

As the world continually becomes cashless, and digital payment transaction values increase, the opportunity for technology providers offering cybersecurity products and services also increases. According to estimates from leading analytics firm GlobalData, increased demand for cybersecurity will lead to global security revenues in the retail banking sector rising from $7.9 billion in 2019 to $9.8 billion by 2024. Blockchain, AI/Machine Learning and data encryption technologies can all be used for compliance and following financial crime standards.

With the rate of innovation in the FinTech sector continuing to increase, the emphasis on compliance and financial crime standards will remain a priority for the foreseeable future. Banking and payment providers will need to continually utilise these technologies to ensure a more advanced security infrastructure, without hindering the user experience for their consumers.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are beginning to disrupt the banking and payments industry

NFTs are tokenised versions of assets that can be traded on a blockchain, the digital ledger technology (DLT) behind cryptocurrencies, and there is a continuing surge in their popularity, with large transactions being reported. NFTs are unique entities that cannot be exchanged one-for-one, meaning their use case is growing across a vast number of FinTech and non-FinTech industries, such as music, video games and art.

The technology behind NFTs is beginning to impact the banking sector with the potential to provide vast improvements, such as operational cost savings and reducing the time traditionally required for certain processes. The provenance of goods, fraud prevention and debt management can all be streamlined and verified using NFTs. Technology examples include RTFKT Inc. and Randombly, LLC.

As NFTs begin to change how people think about the ownership of creations and digital payments, their usage is likely to continue to surge, although concerns over energy consumption and the carbon footprint of NFTs opens the discussion on whether scaling their usage is feasible in their current form.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is reshaping the online payments landscape

PaaS is gaining traction in the FinTech sector and is projected to hit $16.7 billion by 2024. This cloud computing model allows third-party providers to deliver hardware and software tools (usually those needed for application development), to users over the internet.

Companies implementing the PaaS model, will see improved time-to-market and scalability as a result of them being able to develop, run and manage applications in the cloud. Additionally, companies can quickly adapt to customer needs, and avoid the cost of building and sustaining traditional software in-house, allowing them to save time on development and focus resources on sales, marketing and other revenue-generating activities.

PaaS examples include SAP, whose solutions enables digital transformation across enterprises, by allowing companies to run business critical processes quickly and securely in the cloud. In addition, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform, provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage and networking.

Due to the clear benefits provided by these technologies, we expect businesses to continually leverage them over the coming months in order to meet their goals.

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