Technology

With useful data and information piling up in the financial realm, firms can use all the help they can get to more efficiently compile and employ it. Automation, which manifests itself in many forms, is a must for financial institutions. Natural language processing translates words into useful tools and applications that enable financial companies to be more compliant, profitable and sustainable and is experiencing increasing adoption in the financial industry.

Few of us don’t enjoy a good game, and the more competitive, the better, which is why numerous firms are enlisting the gamification strategy to draw users in. But is the practice always justified, let alone ethical, especially in activities such as trading through which finances can be compromised? The controversial method has pros and cons, but it is sure to be more readily adopted as consumers increasingly embrace it.

Silicon Valley, London and Beijing come to mind in response to the phrase tech hub, but around the world, promising and trailblazing tech hubs are springing up in a number of locales, especially in Asia and Africa. This article examines three emerging, highly competitive tech hotspots—Singapore, Bengaluru and Kenya—that are drawing start-ups and talent and giving the leading tech mega-centres a run for the money, including venture-capital investment.

Like artists, brilliant innovations are not always appreciated immediately. Such is the case of the QR Code, invented in Japan in the early 1990s to boost manufacturing and retail efficiency. In the socially distanced COVID-19 environment, this invention is proving indispensable in a variety of transactions and activities, from making payments to reading menus. Partnering with smartphones, the QR Code is proving itself a boon to both commerce and health.

Today, cloud computing is not only critical to the future success of the European financial sector. It also sits at the heart of the continent’s COVID-19 economic recovery plan. However, due to concerns relating to regional independence and operational resilience, the European Commission (EC) is wary of financial institutions central to Europe’s success becoming too dependent on individual cloud providers. 

2021 has the potential to be a defining year in the fight against global financial crime. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed widespread vulnerabilities as compliance teams seek to manage remote employees spread across the world; regulators and governments are tightening restrictions; and technology is advancing at breakneck speed in a bid to keep pace with the increasingly sophisticated methods being used by financial criminals.

As a host of industry initiatives, innovative technologies and new digital forms of currency emerge, payments are rapidly evolving—with multiple routes emerging that each look likely to lead to a payment destination that is instant, 24/7/365 and fully transparent. With banks seeking to navigate this changing landscape, how is this payment destination being secured? Not with a one-size-fits-all remedy, but through a combination of developing technologies and solutions.

Once the exclusive domain of banks, lending is breaking out, enabled by fintechs and big techs. As technology snowballs, digital lending is becoming a worldwide phenomenon but is especially evident in Asia, with providers sprouting up and gaining a footing, buoyed by the pandemic and the system changes it has introduced. What are the current trends, and what can we expect to see develop on Asia’s digital-lending front in 2021?

Finding the perpetrators of crimes is a taxing task in terms of time and money; however, regulators require banks to comply with AML and KYC regulations or pay penalties. Data is key to uncovering the criminals who exploit banks for illicit purposes, but employing data to best advantage is easier said than done. Tools such as entity resolution and network analytics make the process much more trustworthy and less costly.

2021 is fraught with questions about banking’s future in the strange, perplexing COVID-19 world, but there are key technological trends for industry participants to explore and exploit. Open banking, embedded finance, time and money, personalization, cybersecurity, digital currencies, payments without intermediaries will be principal factors in reshaping banking in Russia and worldwide. Staying in the game will hinge on a bank’s determination to make digital transformation its key strategical goal.