Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Digitization

Digitization of finance: The Fintech boom

The Fintech or financial technology industry is booming. Banks, insurance companies, telecommunications carriers and financial corporates are being urged to embrace the digital wave. There has been a 60 per cent rise in global Fintech investment in 2015, valued at USD20 billion1. As financial services go digital, will cash become obsolete? What is Fintech? Fintech is, simply put, the use of technology to enhance financial services and make it more accessible as well as efficient. From asset management and lending services to ledgers and payments, Fintech is transforming the financial services realm rapidly. Fintech is providing all these services at a lower cost, threatening to disrupt large financial institutions. Since 2008, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) exposed loopholes in the financial system and was a wake-up call to service providers. Moreover, it opened an opportunity for better, innovative finance models and banking services. For instance, in April 2016

Banking on digital disruption

The future of financial services is all about digitalization. This much is well known. What is less well known is that this is also the reason why banking transactions might be driven by non-bank disruptors in the coming years. How well will future innovations such as e-currencies be integrated into the banking industry? Will cash become obsolete? Jeffrey Bahar, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Spire Research and Consulting, reflects on the drastic changes happening in financial transactions today. The combination of digital cash and virtual currencies has inevitably curbed the usage of cash in developed markets and across many Asia-Pacific countries. Cash as we know it might lose its status as the dominant form of payment by volume in the coming years – unless banks create innovative new modes of payments to counter the trend. Bahar opined that mobile penetration would continue to rise in the developing Asia-Pacific markets. Unbanked and under-banked market segments would inc