More and more financial institutions are tapping into FinTech technologies to make their products and services highly accessible and win over their competitors. In fact, a financial business has to try really hard not to adopt any financial software and stay afloat. Let’s have a look at today’s trends in financial technology software that are transforming the industry forever.

Artificial Intelligence

These days, artificial intelligence, machine or deep learning and neural networks get a mention in most scientific and tech blogs and articles. They may seem like the same thing, but in fact, they are separate parts of the same collective. To clear it up, neural networks perform machine or deep learning. The result is artificial intelligence. This is one of the holy grails of financial software development.

To be successful a business has to have access to a massive amount of data. The computer organizes it to become actionable data to draw insights from. At the moment, only large multinational corporations or few tech giants have access to such volumes of data. However, if the US government and the EU open their records, it will give startups and other smaller enterprises a level playing field.

Cloud Computing

Since the advent of cloud computing, Amazon has become one of the world’s most valuable companies and Microsoft has started a second life with their Azure platform.This was a game changer because startups now have access to the same computing and storage capabilities as the multinationals. As a result, it allows new entrants to scale easier. It also means that with so much data and personal information in the cloud, cybersecurity needs to be kicked up to the next level. With the coming of 5G technology, cloud computing is getting ready to enter the next level. With less lag and better connectivity, moving and gathering data will be easier than ever. With better access to real-time data, FinTech players can start making good timely decisions.

Interacting with Voice

Do you remember when you asked Alexa anything? If the first thing you talk to when you get home is Alexa, then you can feel how voice is slowly replacing the mouse or even touchscreens. For the FinTech software players the borders are only as far as their imagination goes. Imagine being able to ask about the status of your bank loan or bank account balance. A trader may even use it to buy and sell stocks as if they were on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The only difference is that they would not have to shout over other traders. In fact, your biggest worry might be your kids getting access to the interface. There was an amusing case where a young child used her parent’s Echo to order hundreds of dollars of toys.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Tech like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have become game changers. They transformed the way people can interact with the environment around them. These virtual worlds meant that you wouldn’t need solid objects to give a good presentation. Businesses have used them to entertain as well as inform. A real estate company can show off virtual properties to make sales before laying the first stone. A trader may use augmented reality to move funds with their hands, making buying and selling real fun.

Future businesses might use these technologies to create three dimensional representations of their data sets to give them insights that a 2D version is not capable of. In addition, businesses may hold virtual reality meetings to be able to unite partners from far-away lands and save the planet with lower carbon footprints.

Robots, Robots, Robots

Thanks to robots, gone are the days where a person would sit there performing boring data entry. These days, automation is happening everywhere. You can use your email, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts to quickly fill in forms. Wall Street trading companies are setting up conditions where the buying and selling of stocks happen in a matter of a second. Amazon is using algorithms to automate millions of price adjustments each day. In fact, there are FinTech tools that, as long as you are using the same suite of tools, allow you to transition from one process to the next smoothly and without any data loss. The system will take all the data from one place and enter it in the right places instantly. This means faster processes and less human error. All of this enables people to concentrate on higher value tasks like critical thinking and relationship building.

Bitcoin

Bitcoins may get a lot of press coverage due to the value of each coin. However, it is the technology underneath the hood that has the FinTech sector excited - blockchain. Blockchain is a supposedly secure record of all the transactions that had taken place within a system. It is decentralized. That means no single party has all the control. It is trustworthy as every participant has the same records so nobody can lie. It is secure because it would take a massive amount of energy and computing to break the encryption. The only downside is that it can be quite slow. Think 10 transaction verifications per second to thousands from Visa and Mastercard.

Sensors and Gadgets

A few years back, the internet of things took the tech world by storm. This is because there was a prediction that 21 billion devices would be connected to the internet by 2025. This presented a huge opportunity to make use of such huge amounts of data as temperature, measurements, and locations. The insights gained from these sensors may be actioned to give customers better services or gain opportunities to make sales. The only problem is that these devices can be easily hacked into. Therefore, a secure environment is of paramount importance.

Even though FinTech devices and financial software have become a big part of our lives, this is just the beginning. With the adoption of 5G standard of internet, as well as advances in hardware, it will open up the possibility for fintech jobs (see the in-depth market review made by EffectiveSoft). With the increased capabilities like these, the sky’s the limit.