Fintech startups are not limited to blockchain
Fintech is not limited to only such revolutionary inventions as blockchain, and in the near future we will see how financial services are transformed under the influence of technologies that everyone has been waiting for for a long time. Individual technologies appeared at different times in different places, but because of the immaturity of computing power and high cost, they did not find development. Biometrics, artificial intelligence, processing of large amounts of data, augmented reality - each direction will entail changes in the field of financial services.
- Biometrics will allow you to identify a person remotely and fill remote service channels. Fewer bank branches will be required, but more biometrics identification points.
- Artificial intelligence will allow turning investment consulting into a mass service, which will become a cheap and instant option.
- The use of big data processing will make mass personalization possible when an offer is delivered to the user here and now.
- Augmented reality will provide the consultant robot with a tool to visualize the decision in a format that matches the user's preferences and habits. VIP banking will become massive and remote.
The current perception of blockchain is largely known as a disruptive technology that will break down all existing institutions based on the services of an intermediary and build ecosystems of equal participants. The three advantages of the blockchain are most often called: the absence of an intermediary (peer-to-peer, if this is an advantage at all), data integrity (due to "immutability" - invariance of records, "golden copy" - the presence of authentic data for each user, "traceability" - data traceability) and the ability to implement self-executing smart contracts. An example of the latest technology is a bond,
Most real blockchain projects in the financial sector (if not all projects at all) are based on two advantages - a guarantee of data integrity and the possibility of implementing smart contracts. To give up trust - the role of a mediator - is unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future. It is needed, for example, from the point of view of guaranteeing the fulfillment of obligations, since it will take responsibility for resolving certain problem situations (defaults, hacker attacks, etc.). Therefore, now in infrastructure organizations private blockchain systems are being developed - private blockchains, where verification is carried out in one way or another by selected participants.
All these changes are a huge field for innovation and search and the very broth in which fintech companies grow and multiply. Each bank chooses how to go through these changes, but is unlikely to be able to abandon experiments.
Among the fintech startups, there are solutions for children, banks and forensic scientists. For example, the project of the financial marketplace PandaMoney will help parents teach their child how to handle money and how to accumulate it correctly in game mode. Ozforensics recognizes photo fraud using algorithms for visualizing altered areas: it detects pixel structures indistinguishable to the human eye in different areas of the image and visualizes artificially altered areas. Startup Smart Security identifies the user by his behavioral characteristics. The solution uses a continuous machine learning cycle to authenticate based on how users naturally interact with their digital devices. An attacker will not be able to use the stolen login and password, because his manner of entering this data will be completely different from the patterns that the owner showed.