Watch out for these fintech trends in 2023

The fintech industry or financial technology has recently emerged in the market but has contributed to improving financial services for both businesses and consumers. Integrating technological advancements into the finance sector includes using robo advisors, payments apps and even crypto applications. Such cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are known to drive the modern fintech industry. The Ethereum price USD was highly influenced by the blockchain’s latest update, the Merge, which changed its previous PoW consensus mechanism to PoS, one of the best improvements for fintech.

2022 has brought many upgrades in the fintech industry, from new financial regulations to the rise of digital-only banking that allows users to use banking facilities only through digital platforms. Overall, the increased digitization in the financial sector benefits customers since they only need a good internet connection for any transaction or to solve a problem. At the same time, businesses can provide more and better services and fast improvement.

Let’s see what 2023 will bring us regarding fintech technology.

Embedded finance

Embedded finance uses a platform or a customer journey experience to place a financial product to reach end customers more efficiently. Anything from customer loyalty apps, digital wallets, or accounting software can be embedded in finance, which has been recently improved due to the digitization of commerce and business management strategies.

There are two leading distributors of embedded finance:

Fintechs, or technology providers, are the ones contributing to the platform through which finance products are customized;
Licensed financial institutions, or balance sheet providers, are the ones manufacturing these financial products, partnering with fintech for better-integrated offerings;

Embedded finance is set to change the fintech industry by:

Settling better relationships between financial providers and consumers;
Providing new revenue streams by adding value to financial companies;

Creating a new type of competition for financial services companies;
Forging new partnerships between businesses;

Alternative finance

Alt financing is a new alternative to traditional banking. Although alternative finance has been on the market for a while, the sector has boomed in the past years due to economic and social changes. It is one of the best finance advancements since it addresses the gaps in the usual financial markets. Some of these include the inability to access formal banking systems in some regions or not qualifying for a bank loan as a business. Alternative financing consists of the following examples:

Invoice financing
Crowdfunding
P2P lending

Lines of credit
Term loans
Merchant cash advances

Revenue-based financing

Alternative finance is expected to grow in terms of CAGR (compound annual growth rate) this year, and some of its features will become more popular in the future, such as the following:

Non-bank loans will be more attractive to customers since they provide easy and fast BPL models;

Alternative lending packages will be on the rise, allowing clients to reduce their risks through small-ticket loans;
More fintech partnerships will emerge to reinvent business services;
Alternative currencies in the form of crypto will be provided by turning platforms into accessible services through API integrations;

SaaS platforms

Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers software solutions, offering value-added services and increasing automated security. Since both markets have developed in recent years, fintech companies demanded SaaS solutions to provide better customer support and accelerate digital transformation. SaaS helps the fintech industry through the following:

Increasing predictability;
Ease of access to software applications;

Cost incentives;
Cyber and digital security;
Consumer adoption;

As cloud computing services, SaaS provides users with plenty of benefits, such as the flexibility of capacity planning based on the company’s needs. At the same time, such software programs are easy to use and perform proof-of-concept to test the software functionality and be able to release features in advance of the product. POC is highly beneficial for businesses because it can help turn ideas and concepts into authentic products with fewer investments and time consumed on trials.

AI technology

Artificial intelligence has helped many industries to develop and seek better practices. In fintech, AI enables chatbot interactions and personalized customer service while driving infrastructure decisions such as combating cybercrimes and money laundering. Some of the best use cases in fintech provided by AI include the following examples:

Increased security is driven by authentication. In the future, it’s expected that passwords and usernames will be changed with AI-powered security solutions that will enhance business security;
Behavior-based investment predictions. AI has made it possible to evaluate unstructured data, which means that fintech will start forecasting marketing strategies and product usefulness based on consumer trends;
Automated data processing. AI can help increase agility in IT services, therefore balancing security and IT objectives;

The only issue regarding AI is the ethical impact it might have in such critical decision-making processes. Although AI has yet to be included ideally in fintech, some changes may occur, and the procedures will be adequately improved.

RegTech

RegTech, or regulatory technology, will become a better way for companies to comply. It’s one of the newest upgrades regarding fintech, and it’s one of the most necessary due to alternative finance, blockchain, and AI technologies that need to be better regulated. Companies need to be updated regularly to keep up with compliance, and RegTech has the following benefits:

Efficiency gains. Processing a high volume of data has become more challenging with time, but fintech technologies can keep up and extract valuable insights from this process;

Greater data accuracy. RegTech can help implement the right technology to streamline compliance processes, therefore removing human error and increasing exposure;
Improved risk management. Market abuse, cyberattacks, and fraud are still a problem in the financial sector, but with RegTech, many tools can provide better resources to minimize and eventually eliminate these risks;

Wrapping up

As technology develops, fintech will change the financial sector by providing better solutions and resources to the market. At the same time, since cloud technology and machine learning are emerging, the financial industry is expected to adapt to the consumer’s demands and create superior products and services.