The 3 Biggest Trends In Finance We’ve Seen This Year

In 2020, financial services were disrupted by a sudden switch to digitization and digital interactions. This was as a result of the impact made by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Exchange platforms closed down their trading operations and embraced remote/virtual trading. Mobile banking transactions became more popular, personal trading apps saw high transaction records, and equally call center personnel ensured customers’ needs were met from their living rooms.

It is safe to say that there was rapid growth in the finance industry during the heat of the pandemic. With physical contacts limited and totally restricted in most cases, customers could depend on digital financial services to gain access and distribute funds appropriately. 

Even though the financial industry stood up to the occasion and ran its business as usual, it has become evident that the change cannot be short-lived.

Financial institutions realize they’ve got to be intentional about their strategies and technical setup. They need to verify whether the tools they’ve relied on would be befitting for their organization going forward. Here are some of the biggest trends as seen with financial giants. 

Digital Banking

In areas where the virus is still claiming lives, movements are still restricted and in other places, there are limitations on physical gathering. Either way, no one really fancies the long queues at the bank anymore. Everybody wants to get stuff done without leaving their houses now. Despite the availability of online banking, people still queue at the bank due to ignorance or limitations of online banking.

Totally abolishing physical contacts for transactions at the bank seemed impossible until the pandemic. Being able to access funds remotely became crucial for survival which traditional banking could not meet up with. In light of that, new financial firms arose and leveraged fintech solutions to provide easy digital banking services where physical contact isn’t needed.  A study indicated that digital payment has become one of the biggest financial products.

This has sparked widespread interest in such services and there is developing competition amidst institutions that offer digital banking services alone. This is beneficial not only to bankers but to consumers as they have multiple options to choose from each having their wide range of offers to select from.

Open Banking

Traditional banks are only well-known for keeping people’s money. However, with recent happenings and increasing awareness of financial education, people now want to invest their hard-earned money instead of letting lie around in the bank.  This has led to third-party financial corporations giving banks a run for their money by providing legitimate and flexible high returns on investments and customers can easily gain access to such services through open banking.

What open banking does is it gives third-party financial institutions access to consumer banking data through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to facilitate investment purposes as requested by the customers.  

This isn’t just limited to investment plans only but access to loans. It used to be quite hard trying to get a loan directly from the bank. Now with the right platform with some highlighted on www.bugiscredit.sg,  you can borrow money in minutes. Despite the improvement in the sector, there are security concerns over how exposed the customer’s data is in open banking, but this can be prevented with the joint effort of the parties involved. Either way, open banking is one big trend on fintechs’ radar. 

Work From Home 

For the most part of 2020, the widespread restrictions caused businesses globally to keep their organizations running and that meant also keeping their employees engaged. During that period, corporate offices became inaccessible in the blink of an eye, the entire workforce of financial institutions—irrespective of their importance depended on their home internet connections alongside VPN and remote desktop infrastructure solutions to carry out their duties.

Even though it allowed teams to get their jobs done, there were certain issues like interoperability issues, internet speed, and broadband network that caused restrictions in the workflow. 

This is still an option for millions of people all over the world, but remote work solutions need to comprehensively examine the possibility of having a seamless, productive heterogeneous, and global workforce, Not forgetting the traders who require high-speed internet and quantitative analyzer who requires lots of computing capability.

It will take a total restructuring and exposure to see to it that work environments are evolving and there’s the need that everyone sees that the outcome has a direct effect on people who work on and off-site. These trends might not look more serious, but they’re gradually shaping up what would be the norm a few years from now.