The present and the future of FinTech

The present and the future of Fintech

Technology and Society

Consciously or not, nowadays technology has become an inseparable part of our everyday life. It’s almost impossible to find an area of human existence where the traditional ways of proceedings are not being replaced by technological innovations. And the biggest reason behind this trend is the fact that we are trying to simplify our lives by not spending much time, money and effort on processes that could be handled online, with only one click on our desktop or mobile. The financial sector is no exception to that trend and FinTech is the obvious example.

What is FinTech?

FinTech (Financial technology) refers to every new tech that tries to improve, augment and digitalize the delivery and use of traditional financial services for businesses and consumers. FinTech is designed to help the financial entities, business owners and different financial service users better manage their day-to-day financial operations and lives in general. Fintech achieves this goal by utilizing specialized software, applications and algorithms that are used on computers and most commonly on smartphones.

FinTech in everyday life

There was a time when signature-verifying technologies first used by banks, ATM’s and credit cards were the newest examples of FinTech. In today’s world, whenever you transfer money to your friend, deposit a check with your mobile phone, buy crypto or NFT, use Paypal, Revolut, lend money from the bank by clicking on a button in your gadget, etc. - you are using FinTech. FinTech startups and companies are growing rapidly since the demand on those kinds of projects is very high. According to Ernst & Young’s latest Global FinTech Adoption Index : only 16% of the world's population used FinTech for money transfer and payment solutions in 2015, while this number grew to 64% by 2019. Now, the popularity of FinTech is increasing day by day and of course the pandemic made us appreciate more the importance of being able to handle financial processes from home, without anyone's assistance.

The Future of FinTech

The FinTech industry is growing so rapidly that it is really hard and almost impossible to determine and analyze the future of it. But one thing is clear-the demand on those products are increasing at very high speeds so as long as there is demand, FinTech is going to be developing for sure. The Covid-19 Pandemic and its effects also make it hard to accurately measure the rate of growth of FinTech. Throughout this period Fintech companies and their customers have suffered financial issues—some have had to downsize or cut short the number of staff, and others have a hard time securing investor funding. But, despite the uncertainty on the market in the short-term, we can definitely see the long-term FinTech trends, which most likely will stay intact.

So for the next decade we should probably expect a lot of FinTech innovations related to blockchain, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, virtual reality and P2P.