The Fintech industry is currently in its prime. The increasing usage of cryptocurrency technology for financial applications has made blockchain technology synonymous with financial technology. The year 2016 signaled the rise of fintech sector, with many companies, both big and small coming up with some of the cutting-edge technology for banking and financial institutions.
A leading online technology magazine has recently published its predictions for 2017, similar to the one from last year. The author behind these predictions claims to have gotten at least 75% of previous year’s predictions right.
According to the author, this year will see the number of fintech companies, at least in the United States reduce drastically. The reasons for such an occurrence ranges from increasing costs, realignment of focus towards different verticals apart from fintech, stiff competition from startups and even mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships. Such an occurrence is already prevalent in the cryptocurrency industry, which makes it a bit less surprising to the Bitcoin community.
The fintech companies that are responsible for some of the leading technology solutions may soon find themselves in the position to offer services to investors directly. These fintech companies are expected to receive banking charters, enabling them to provide B2C asset management services. The creation of commodity and asset-backed crypto-tokens is a start. These tokens along with proprietary blockchain platforms will soon become the best places for easy and quick investments and trading.
Even though most of these predictions are directly or indirectly related to the developments in distributed ledger technology, blockchain receives a special place in the forecast. The author expects blockchain based platforms to become operational during 2017. Many platforms have already undergone successful trials in the past year, and there are chances of at least a small percentage of them going live in 2017.
The previous year has already laid the groundwork for all the predictions that are stated by the author. If the fintech industry continues to develop at the same pace, then all these aforementioned scenarios are bound to unfold. However, there are concerns of Brexit throwing a spanner in the works, in which case, there will be a slight delay in these predictions coming true.
Ref: TechCrunch | Image: NewsBTC
