The Issue Isn’t What Technology. The Issue Is Where and When?

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This article in tech2 agrees with Mercator’s list of Emerging Technologies but it leaves out key details that include where within the financial ecosystem these technologies will first hit and when:

“Blockchain, cognitive computing and cloud are some of the technologies that will shape the finance industry the most in the digital age, banking and technology chief executives told a financial conference on Monday. IBM Corp’s president and chief executive Ginni Rometty said that cognitive computing, or computer systems that can mimic the way the human brain works, will be the “ultimate way” finance firms will become more competitive in the future.

‘I think the advantage is going to go to who has the best insights,’ Rometty told delegates. Over the past few years financial institutions have been struggling to take advantage of vast amounts of data that they store, which is held unevenly across their numerous databases. ‘We all have mounds and mounds of data, but getting data to produce insight, that is the holy grail’, Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer at Bank of America Corp, told Reuters on the sidelines of the Fintech Ideas Festival.

Financial institutions have also been ramping up investment into developing blockchain technology, the distributed data-base system that first emerged as the software underpinning cryptocurrency bitcoin. ‘Blockchain is so profound it will do for trusted transactions what the internet did for information,’ IBM’s Rometty said, describing it as one of the most transformative technologies for finance.

Biometrics and cloud computing were also among the technologies cited as having the most impact for the sector. Tim Sloan, chief executive of Wells Fargo & Co, said the bank was moving away from passwords and adopting technology such as voice recognition to identify customers. He also called for greater adoption of cloud technology to ‘test projects through, much more quickly.’ ”

The Mercator Emerging Technology Outlook provides specifics that include where within the ecosystem these technologies will first appear and when. For example, the Mercator Biometric report being published next week performs a 40+ page deep dive that describes the forces impacting the authentication market and predicts the rise of persistent identity. A report due just a week later will provide a forecast for consumer adoption of biometrics on the mobile devices. It can’t get any deeper than that!

Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group

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