Top FinTech trends that you were a part of in 2021 and never even knew it!
While 2020 was an unprecedented disruption, 2021 was said to be a year of a remarkable adaptation...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1950s, but only in the last six years — with the advent of open-source, low-cost cloud computing and storage — has it become useful in solving real-world problems. In that short time, we’ve seen AI find new solutions in a wide range of industries like enterprise networking, automotive, medical and financial industries. It has resulted in artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) moving from a marketing hype to a helpful tool adopted across the enterprise.
Information overload – Pain points for customers
Fast-changing industry
The overwhelming amount of information online that we deal with (data, articles, resources on the net, or even in our company databases) seems infinite and we often can’t find the right information. We don’t have enough time and energy to do so, meaning we can’t gather the knowledge we need to make decisions promptly. We’re struggling to keep up to date or update our expertise in a rapidly changing field. We’re finding it harder, if not impossible, to dip our feet in a new market, adapt quickly, and survive in changing circumstances.
Need to adapt quickly to a new environment
Due to the Covid pandemic, we all experienced the power of change and the necessity for fast and flexible adaptation. In this respect, FinTech is a priority area with its ten thousand small and large companies in North America. Worldwide there will be 25K FinTech companies by 2021, based on the BCG’s projection (9K in EMEA, 6K in APAC; cited by Statista Infographics (8)). Our work is necessary to produce comprehensive analysis and decision-making material very quickly on an often-changing topic. To do this, you have to comb through many resources and look at internal and external databases. Still, often we do not find suitable quality material; we spend long hours and days researching because the knowledge of the tools at our disposal is limited.
Time spent on gathering info
According to various survey statistics, workers spend too much time searching for information:
Information overload can be measured. An IHS Knowledge Collections Webinar from 2013 provided an exciting statistic by Outsell: an engineer’s time spent searching for information has increased 13% since 2002. Similarly, a survey by SearchYourCloud revealed, “workers took up to 8 searches to find the right document and information.”
Here are a few other statistics about information overload and wasted time spent searching for the correct information – whether external or internal:
• “According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire five employees, but only four show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.” Source: Time Searching for Information.
• “19.8 percent of the business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job effectively,” according to Interact. Source: A Fifth of Business Time is Wasted Searching for Information, says Interact
• IDC data shows that “the knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information. 60% [of company executives] felt that time constraints and lack of understanding of how to find information were preventing their employees from finding the information they needed.” Source: Information: The Lifeblood of the Enterprise. (9,10)
Focusing on AI – 2021 Top AI trends
a. Enterprise level
Based on an article that was published at the end of last year in Forbes (1), we can highlight two predictions:
Customer support will evolve. Cloud and AI are changing how enterprises support their customers and employees and how network vendors will keep their enterprise customers by turning the customer support model upside down. AI can help proactively identify potential connectivity issues, communicating root causes, and provide IT teams the tools and suggestions needed to resolve the problem before it begins to affect customers. AI will play a massive role in the future of networking. AI-powered advancements are happening in video communications to make the tool more useful for enterprises, such as real-time translation for global companies. The current explosion of communication technologies AI will play a massive role in the future of networking. AI-powered advancements are happening in video communications to make the tool more useful for enterprises, such as real-time translation for global companies. The current explosion of communication technologies that bring people together creates a lot of pressure on the infrastructure to keep up with the demand. AI will be crucial in powering a self-driving network to create better user experiences for remote workers.
Whether the employees of companies opt to stay remote or come back to the office, the old way of working has changed forever. The companies that embrace AI technologies are positioned to excel in 2021 and beyond. At all levels of the enterprise, AI will drive us into the next era of work.
In another Forbes article published in December 2020 (2), 26 big corporate executives were asked how they see AI’s future. The most interesting answer was Anand Rao’s, the Global Artificial Intelligence Lead at PwC, who said that their latest AI research shows 86% of businesses are currently reaping the benefits of the better customer experience through AI, and 25% of companies with widespread AI adoption can expect to see an increased revenue during 2021. The pandemic has uncovered AI’s value, lending itself to enhancing tasks related to workforce planning, simulation modeling, and demand projection.
b. AI trends in FinTech
Artificial Intelligence has become a leading trend that affects the FinTech and InsurTech industries and healthcare, business intelligence, and marketing. It makes tasks efficient and lowers costs while attempting to simulate human behavior. It is predicted that the growth of AI will continue this year.
AI has the potential to eliminate human error in banking procedures, allow banks to understand customer demands truly, make credit cards extinct, and influence the attraction of the unbanked to financial services. It will bring a digital revolution to banking that will transform the processes to fit consumers’ lives.
In 2021, FinTech apps will continue to utilize AI more broadly than has been the case to date. Whether it’s chatbots addressing banking customers’ queries, fraud-prevention tools verifying the authenticity of KYC (know your customer) documents, or analytics engines analyzing large volumes of data, the potential for AI’s use in FinTech will continue to grow significantly. (3)
According to the article published in The FinTech Times in November, experts said that in 2021, they expect AI to become even more intelligent, with more sophisticated chatbots and advanced functionalities and fraud prevention becoming the norm. It will improve the accuracy and personalization of financial services and enable individuals to access personal finance products better, ultimately improving people’s financial well-being and supporting those keen to stay on top of their finances during these uncertain times. (4,5)
A research report published in June 2020 about AI in FinTech Market* by Research and Markets valued the global “AI in the FinTech” market at $6.67 billion in 2019 and expected it to grow to $22.6 billion by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.37 percent (2020-2025). The report stated that the increasing demand for process automation among financial organizations is the market driver. And process automation is one of the significant drivers of artificial intelligence in financial organizations. It is further evolving into cognitive process automation, where AI systems can perform even more complex automation processes. (4)
*AI in FinTech Market – Growth, Trends, Forecasts (2020-2025), Research and Markets
c. NLP trends
Majorly the adoption of cloud-based solutions drives the growth of NLP.
2020 has been a promising year in technology advancements for businesses across diverse industries, from AI to robotics and cloud to the blockchain. Natural language processing (NLP) has evolved as a revolutionary technology in AI research, focused on processing and utilizing text and speech data to create intelligent machines and produce insights. The most exciting direction is building devices capable of conversingwith humans about complex topics.
While the rise in smart device usage, adoption of cloud-enabled solutions, and NLP-based applications to improve customer service define the NLP market growth, experts are now exploring ways to unleash its full potential in the coming years. They predict cognitive-communication (cognitive computing), semantic search, business monitoring, and sentiment analysis are shaping this technology in 2021.
From a marketing point of view, the most exciting directions where NLP has an increasingly larger role are the following without diving into the technology details:
Market intelligence monitoring
NLP would play a key role in tracking and monitoring market intelligence reports to extract intelligent information for future strategy formulation businesses. In 2021 and beyond, NLP will find its application in a plethora of business domains. Currently, this technology is widely used in financial marketing. It shares detailed insights into market sentiments, tender delays, and closures and extracts information from large repositories.
Customer satisfaction measurement
Transfer learning will make way for pre-trained models to create sentiment analysis applications, text classifications, etc. In medical use cases, transfer learning will allow patient satisfaction to be accurately measured. The same can be applied to any service industry.
Customized product recommendations
E-retailers would use NLP and machine learning techniques to increase customer engagement, analyze their browsing patterns and shopping trends. Other intelligence insights include purchase behavior, auto generated product descriptions, and others.
Intelligent semantic search
The requirement for a semantic search is another trend anticipated to impact NLP in 2021. This search would engage both Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Understanding, requiring a granular comprehension of the central ideas contained within the text.
Intelligent cognitive-communication
NLP will also become more common in cases that understand user intent, like intelligent chatbots and semantic search.
Growth in chatbots and virtual assistants
Powered by development in Natural Language Processing (NLP), the chatbot and virtual assistant market growth will be robust. The chatbot market was worth $2.6 billion in 2019 and is predicted to reach US$9.4 billion by 2024.
Sentiment analysis for social media
Natural Language Processing would be a great tool to comprehend and analyze the audience responses to a brand communication published on social media platforms. Also known as opinion mining, it helps analyze the attitude and emotional state, happy, sad, angry, annoyed, etc., of the consumer who is commenting/engaging with the company through social media posts.
The practical use of NLP enables organizations with large amounts of unstructured text or spoken data to overcome dark data issues and effectively mine them for insight. However, what’s truly notable about NLP is the multiple dimensions of AI it involves, hinting at the overall dynamic impact this technology will have in the coming years. (6,7)
How BrightMeUp solution can benefit marketing?
You can forget endless searching of irrelevant articles. BrightMeUp! collects, selects, and structures meaningful content from 190+ reliable websites on a FinTech topic you need.
The application has – besides many FinTech-focused categories – a marketing-focused category: “Marketing in FinTech services” that contains Avatar topics like Content Marketing, Customer experience, etc., where you can follow the latest news in a focused way.
Thanks to intelligent virtual staff – Avatars – it is possible to quickly and automatically get:
- an in-depth exploration and knowledge of a topic, even a very complex one, and
- regular updates on a particular topic, which is necessary to maintain competitiveness.
You can use the semantic search technology benefits on the Explore page in the desktop version, the search interface. You can use sentences, paragraphs, or even full articles as search terms, unlike in the case of other search engines. This way youwill find highly accurate results, recommended articles, and the content you need.
The core of our technology is the completely new linguistic-mathematical models of the semantics and grammar of natural languages created by our researchers.
The company’s innovation activities are built on these models based on developing our own classification and search technologies.After years of research and development, we have created a semantic search engine and a trainable AI-tool using innovative NLP technology.
BrightMeUp! provides practical marketing assistance in line with existing market needs by using AI technology in the FinTech field.
Key takeaways
AI trends:
At the enterprise level, the main predictions are:
– The customer support will evolve
– AI will play a massive role in the future of networking.
In FinTech: Process automation is one of the significant drivers of artificial intelligence in financial organizations. It is further evolving into cognitive process automation, where AI systems can perform even more complex automation processes.
NLP trends: The NLP market growth comes from the rise in smart device usage, cloud-enabled solutions, and NLP-based applications to improve customer service. Experts predict cognitive-communication (cognitive computing), semantic search, business monitoring, and sentiment analysis are shaping this technology in 2021.
Time: Information overload is a valid problem for all professionals. The number of FinTech companies is going to reach 25 thousand in 2021 worldwide. It will be more challenging to follow them and the new trends year by year.
Automation: There is a new technology solution that collects, selects, and structures meaningful content from 190+ reliable websites on a FinTech topic you need – BrightMeUp!
Effectivity: Create your own customized Newsfeed by selecting your favorite specific topics and focus on the point. If you don’t find a topic you need, we at BrightMeUp! can create it for you.
About Negentropics
Negentropics Software Plc. is an AI startup that carries out both basic and applied research in NLP.
Our company was founded in 2015 by three Hungarian entrepreneurs with linguistic, medical, and legal backgrounds. It is located in Budapest, Hungary. Currently, we have a team of 12 enthusiastic colleagues.
Our application, BrightMeUp! provides continuously fresh news on FinTech in a specialized newsfeed, allowing you to follow as narrow topics as you want. This new information hub is based on a meaning-based (semantic) search engine and an AI tool, Avatar, that learns any topic just like you. Avatars read, interpret, and select relevant articles from a specialized database on their topics.
Currently, we provide more than 100 striking FinTech topics in 20+ categories to follow in an AI-powered personalized newsfeed. Just choose a topic from the available Avatars or ask for yours in your interest and read what you need. You can stay updated within seconds and read relevant articles only.
To find out more information,please visit our homepage: https://brightmeup.ai, where you can check out topic list and sign up. We appreciate your feedback regarding the app and ready to create Avatars at your request. For the best user experience and full functionality, please use the desktop version.
References:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/12/30/the-biggest-enterprise-ai-trends-for-2021/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2020/12/12/artificial-intelligence-ai-whats-in-store-for-2021/?sh=8117d285a3cd
- https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2020/12/artificial-intelligence-ai-top-trends-2021
- https://internationalbanker.com/technology/top-FinTech-trends-in-2021/
- https://theFinTechtimes.com/FinTech-2021-what-tomorrow-holds/
- https://www.analyticsinsight.net/the-5-top-trends-shaping-natural-language-processing-in-2021/
- https://www.analyticsinsight.net/top-10-natural-language-processing-nlp-trends-for-2021/
- Number of FinTech startups worldwide 2021, by region Published by Statista Research Department, Mar 17, 2021; https://www.statista.com/statistics/893954/number-FinTech-startups-by-region/
- https://www.yokellocal.com/blog/how-to-keep-up-with-trends-in-you-industry
- https://www.cottrillresearch.com/various-survey-statistics-workers-spend-too-much-time-searching-for-information/
90 Seconds with Christopher Fox, Founder of Syncresis, A Firm Specialising in Fintech Thought Leadership
What is “Syncresis,” and how did you come up with it?
90 Seconds with Sam Shrager, Head Of Marketing and Communications
Tell us about your role at BCB Group?