2020 technologies – the year of SD-WAN, PIE and 5G

Start of a New Year and there are websites everywhere making predictions on everything from elections to economies. I used to write my own predictions but honestly cannot be bothered anymore when you have 1,000 other people doing it. Instead, I’ve hand-picked some of my favourite predictions made out there by other people.

Seeking Alpha says that Trump will be re-elected, which is my own view. He may be an abrasive character, but he’s delivered on some of his promises: making America great again at the expense of everyone else. He’ll keep on doing that.

UBS has far more depth to their 2020 investment outlook, noting that 72% of investors describe the investment environment as more challenging than it was five years ago. I guess that’s to be expected, as who knows what old Trump and Boris will get up to?

The only bright sign is that Morgan Stanley forecast global growth will recover from 2020 onward, as trade tensions and monetary police ease, reversing the downward trend of the past seven quarters. In other words, America and China do a deal and we all breathe out.

Sifted has a great summary of start-up and founder views. The ones that hit home for me are that 2020 will be:

• The year traveltech beats fintech — Jean de La Rochebrochard, partner at Kima Ventures

• The year fintechs go global — Hiroki Takeuchi, cofounder and chief executive of fintech GoCardless
• The year that fintech gets real — Taavet Hinrikus, cofounder and chairman of fintech TransferWise
• The year of B2B fintech — Anne Boden, founder and chief executive of UK challenger bank Starling

• The year we talk about values more than unicorns — Roxanne Varza, director of startup campus Station F
• The year of the fintech bundling — Miguel Vicente, head of Barcelona Tech City
• The year of the robot — Daniel Dines, cofounder and chief executive of Romanian unicorn UiPath

Although I can’t let these references go by without mentioning that Pieter van der Does, cofounder and chief executive of fintech Adyen says that 2020 will be the year of Poland, as that’s where I’m living. Pieter’s comment that there’s less promise and more delivery here is spot on.

Re technology, there’s a whole raft of sites predicting stuff from more foldable intelligent mobile phones to AI being used to solve real world problems from conserving wildlife to improving education and more.

ExchangeWire, a data marketeers website, has predictions around privacy and identity, but my favourite is around PIE. PIE stands for Programmatic-Is-Everything, and is really about monetizing everything online. Search. Social. Transactional platforms (Amazon). Web-based display and video. Audio. CTV. DOOH. In-app. You name it, we can sell it to some marketer somewhere.

But my favourite 2020 tech forecasts are from IT Pro, as they found some stuff I’ve never heard of like Google Stadia, the first streaming videogame service, and SD-WAN or, if you prefer, Software-Defined Wide Area Networks. Now, there’s a mouthful to kick off the new year with.

Bringing these forecasts into a banking context are hard, but Finance Monthly dedicated their December issue to it, and noted 20 FinTech’s to watch in 2020, as well as saying that 2020 will be year that Open Banking has its reckoning. We shall see.

Finally, I couldn’t cover 2020 forecasts without hoovering up the great write up by Jim Marous on The Financial Brand, who concludes:

“Because of the advent of 5G wireless systems and higher speed WiFi, the technological change is coming faster than most are prepared for. This will require an adjustment in the culture of most financial institutions as we redefine work and the interactions between humans and machines.”

Yep. A very good reason for picking up a copy of Doing Digital, as it tells you all you need to know to deal with it. More on that later.