The personal finance sector has never been as exciting and competitive as it is today. We have seen waves of transformation in the financial services industry globally over the last few years, but thus far, the thrust of innovation has been largely focused on payments and retail banking.
Over the last two years, however, with the accelerated pace of digital adoption across the spectrum of services that the financial services industry entails, this reality is fast changing.
Ironically, the crippling impact of the COVID-1919 pandemic for humanity and industries the world over, ushered in an era of change and opportunities as a side effect.
We witnessed rapid digital adoption, accelerated transformation, and some much-needed innovation across areas that were confined within the comfort zones of legacy processes and systems. The personal finance industry was one of them.
As someone who has been on the frontlines of the digital payments disruption wave, I had the exciting opportunity to be a part of the sweeping change that the banking industry witnessed in the last decade and was fortunate enough to participate in morphing the way we transact today.
However, the payments transformation, to my mind, is only the tip of the proverbial financial services iceberg. The pandemic forced the financial services industry to take a deep dive into the sea of digital tools that are being developed at lightning speed in innovation sandboxes across the country and the world.
Today, the industry can handpick solutions to bring parts of the business that have been outside the digital realm thus far.
Personal finance was one such space in desperate need of an overhaul, and the pandemic was the perfect storm within which this industry could transform itself into a new avatar powered by the emerging open banking architecture that could help reshape and redefine how we provide credit in a country as large, diverse, and complex as ours.
Opening up the way ahead
In the last few years, as consumer behaviours altered and the swelling millennial demographic with their dramatically different set of priorities and life maps, dictated market trends, we witnessed a rise in the economy of choice.
What this meant for the traditional financial services market is to alter their identity from being traditional service providers to democratising legacy banking systems to make them open, agile, and real-time in their interaction with customers and the way they offer services. The customer feedback loop, in turn, has provided banks with the much-needed insights to enable change by collaborating with fintech innovators who plugin to different services that offer customers with choice, access and safety while transacting with the banking partner for their …….
Source: https://yourstory.com/2021/12/open-banking-architecture-personal-finance/amp