User Review
( votes)As we edge closer towards the start of a new year, we hear the thoughts of Ripple’s Marcus Treacher on how 2020 could change financial services
Financial services sector
Financial services sector-International payments will continue to get faster and smaller.
Payment providers and banks will continue to offer ever faster cross-border payment services to their customers, enabling them to send and receive low-value payments in real-time. The cost overhead of these payments will also continue to shrink.
This trend will accelerate in 2020 as customer demand for frictionless, on-demand payments grows, enabling solutions like Interledger and distributed ledger technologies to gain traction and scale up.
More banks will use banking-as-a-service tech platforms to revolutionise their cost-to-serve and cost-to-change.
As technology costs associated with running and development continue to climb, we can expect banks will turn to cloud providers of banking technology to help radically reduce these costs.
Pioneers of such cloud services – such as 10X and Thought Machine – will be the ones to watch in 2020. Because cloud-hosted banking technology providers have developed new platforms with modern methods, they are ideally placed to easily and cheaply plug into emerging blockchain networks, AI engines and other categories of fintech.
This means the competitive advantage of innovative banks over slower-moving rivals will be intensified. The long-awaited tipping point from on-premise ‘museum’ banking technology to agile, cheap cloud-hosted bank technology is getting closer. 2020 perhaps is the year?
2020 will see new consumer purchase solutions emerge for tourists/travellers that don’t require cards or card rails.
Technology like Ripple’s will be key in achieving this. For example, imagine if a Japanese tourist visiting Thailand could buy goods using a mobile app or QR code, triggering an immediate cross-border payment from their Japanese yen account to a Thai baht merchant’s account. If more consumer purchase solutions start leveraging blockchain technology in the same way, the payoff will – quite literally – be huge!
