It’s almost time to wave goodbye to 2016. This was a big year for fintech, with new regulations, new startups, and new technologies displayed across events like Sibos and Money20/20, making it clear that the progress of fintech can’t really be stopped.
But how will it continue? That’s the real question. To answer it, Bank Innovation has collected predictions from around the industry, so take a look below at how banking is going to change in 2017:
1.Head in the (Public) Cloud
Stephane Dubois, CEO, Xignite
“2017 will see a much more aggressive move toward embracing the public cloud. Many large banks are already doing this secretly. They’re just not being vocal about it. Banks will have to spread risk across multiple providers as they did with operating systems in years past. They can’t be too dependent on any one provider. Coming years will see more and more innovation happening on the public cloud. There is so much scale, and so much stuff already there. Soon you won’t be able to do realtime big data analytics on-premise. It’s not clear who will win — Google, IBM, Amazon — they’re all providing next-generation databases and storage on the public cloud.”
2. Banks and Fintechs Will Team Up
Yolande Piazza, Chief Operating Officer, Citi FinTech
“2017 looks like a very promising year for fintegration, which is Citi’s way of describing how banks embrace innovations from the broader fintech ecosystem to benefit our customers. Big banks have established customer relationships and risk management expertise that many startups lack, while many fintechs have developed simplified experiences that reduce customer pain points. By combining our strengths, we can partner to deliver innovative products more quickly to more customers than ever before. In 2016, Citi has positioned ourselves to benefit from fintegration. Last month Citi unveiled our API developer hub and in the first 3 weeks we’ve had more than 1,400 global developers sign up to innovate with us. We are excited by the potential ideas that we could offer to customers very quickly.”
3. More Change Than the Last Three Years Combined
Brian Roemmele, CEO, Payfinders
“One guarantee is that the rate of change is going to accelerate in an incalculable way in 2017. 2017 will make 2016–which was really the convergence point of artificial intelligence, machine learning, voice interactivity–look like slow motion. The acceleration of the rate of change will be like a compression of 2014 to 2016–all that took place, compressed into one year… What this means is, banking, payments, and retail shopping has been upended. Snap has reinvented the retail sale experience with a vending machine–they’re re-inventing a theatrical buying experience…The other side of that is the whole store is going to become a vending machine, which is what we’re seeing with Amazon Go.”