ai – FINthinkers

The term is not at all a new trend or technology. Previously known as pervasive computing where due to technological advancement and cost feasibility the trend of embedding computational capabilities into everyday objects. This makes them effective in communication as they are network interconnected and performing activities of the end users without a centralised system.

Ubiquitous computing integrates via different devices, industries, environments, applications (e.g. wearable devices, appliances, fleet management, sensors). The goal of it is to make devices “smart” in the form of creating a sensor network capable of collecting, processing and sending data via the context and activity that it is under.

We had seen first phases of such capability involving wireless communication and networking technologies, mobile devices, and RFID tags. With the exponential advancement in internet capabilities, usage of voice recognition and artificial intelligence, the growth and adoption of embedding ubiquitous computing significantly increases now often associated and known to be the internet of things (IOT)

Gartner predicts approximately 8 billion connected objects to be use by the end of 2017 and it appears to be growing. In order to cope with the growth of IOT a heavy incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) fueled autonomy will be required. An AI-driven era of IOT becomes the key building block to herald an increasingly seamless experience and hyperconnectivity as users and their digital counterparts concurrently transpose from one medium/device to another, between multiple environments, the physical and digital ecosystem.

2017 was an interesting year where many developments started to get real traction. Just think about blockchain, bitcoin and artificial intellgence.

2018 will be even more interesting and substantially more challenging. A few predictions for 2018 are as follows:

There will be three core changes for financial services:

Tokens (see Towards a digital barter economy?)
Blockchain
Self Sovereign Identity (see Self Sovereign Digital Identity)

All three aspects levitates a shift towards a distributed decentralized financial system. This affects the core and challenges legacy status quo and its existence in the future.

In addition fueled by the increasing tokenization and availability of blockchain based systems there will be a shift towards

Mobile Payments
Holistic mobile wallets
Global Solutions

There will be no other options for incumbents to integrate into the evolving mesh than to provide API’s to access information and services and to start to rely on others to provide crucial information. Self contained and closed financial services companies as well as local solutions will increasingly face headwinds.

Open Banking / API’s
Global solutions

Last but not least – user interfaces will become much more natural and transparent. The users will be amplified with new sense and access to information supported by intelligent agents.

Natural interfaces, Voice (see Noisy Channel(s) to Channel-less )
Artificial intelligence, Smart Assistants

Regulators will start to come up to speed with the changes. They will find ways to agree with business changes but also ethical standards across borders acknowledging the global nature of digital eco systems. A big challenge will be on the very old tax systems which are not ready yet for the shaping economy.

Tax System

These changes are fundamental – there is a ongoing paradigm change where inherent distributed digital approaches start to outperform the automated legacy processes. There are two big dangers out there

Underestimating the ongoing change (see Noisy Channel(s) to Channel-less)
Overestimating the achievements made (see Digital Tur Tur)

Many of the current developments seem to turn time back and bring up systems again which were used in the past but difficult to apply as physical distance was a limiting factor. Digital changes this – the world becomes some sort of a global village. Have a look at Yap, The Island Of Stone Money – the first productive blockchain system.