What's Trending in Fintech

What even is a trend? Tends on Twitter are measured in real time, today it seems #Fridayfeeling and #BlackCatAppreciationDay are important. On Twitter, trends come and go in moments, they have very little substance, like puffs of wind, to be replaced by another equally trivial one by tomorrow at the latest.

Trends in fintech move at a much slower pace and have a far greater magnitude. In fact, to call them trends is not really accurate. A trend in fintech lasts years, and ultimately becomes absorbed into the entire ‘body’ of what fintech is. Once a trend gathers momentum, and millions, then billions, of funding behind it, it becomes a new sector of its own accord. In the beginning, digitizing financial regulation may have been a ‘trend’ with a few companies working on the idea, now five years later it’s a fintech sub-sector, RegTech, and collectively worth many billions of pounds. Hardly a trend. Same with the peer to peer lending sector, and P2P personal borrowing sector, first it was an experiment, then a trend, now they’re sectors worth billions, trillions Globally.

So one trend in fintech is for trends themselves to become entire industries. Bitcoin was a trend, until it became the frontrunner of thousands of other cryptocurrencies. To ask ‘what are the trends in fintech’ is actually a huge question, because what it translates as it ‘what are the next multibillion pound sub sectors in finance and technology.’ Indeed, are there new sectors waiting to emerge, or erupt, or have most of them already been ‘discovered’? Actually, they have, because for several years at least, people in the sectors have been actively questioning how to turn every factor in finance into an entire digitised sector. So now we need to look deeper into what is happening in all those sub sectors, and also, use a little imagination. Ai is one of the biggest areas of development and exploration right now, and it works cross sector, not just all of fintech but Medical Technology, Educational Technology, and everywhere else.

Artificial Intelligence. To call that a trend is a bit like calling the internet a trend. Ai will get more and more sophisticated, until at some point in the near future, it becomes autonomous. This will happen when the Ai itself has ‘an idea’. What will that idea be? Who knows. What will it lead to? Another idea, and another, in milliseconds. When the Ai begins its own line of questioning it can be called truly intelligent, and once it begins its own line of questioning, and its own line of creativity, and if it has access to the open internet, it’s going to become something beyond human control. So the trend for Ai is this. Continuous development and improvement up to the point where Ai actually becomes intelligent and begins its own line of exploration. At this point what happens is anyone’s guess. If the Ai ‘escapes’ into the internet, it’s immediately indestructible and immortal and has access to everything every one of us says and does. It will also have access to all our infrastructures, finance, military, gas, water, and also the ability to replicate itself without limitation. Hmmm. What’s trending in fintech? Probably safer not to ask. #ThatSkynetFeeling

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