What’s in store for 2024: Fintech

During December, I was bombarded with fintech predictions for 2024. Rather than doing my own, here’s a summary of some of the biggies.

A Statista report projects global market growth from $127.65 billion in 2022 to a staggering $332.3 billion by 2027. Factors fuelling this surge include increased online payment adoption, the rise of embedded finance, and surging demands for financial services in emerging markets.

The Snark machine known as Ron Shevlin reckons that there will five big things in 2024:

1. A big(ger) bank will acquire a BaaS bank
2. Bank-provided BNPL will grow significantly
3. “Employee experience” will be a hot topic
4. RTP volume won't materialize in 2024
5. Use of Generative AI will be under- and over-stated

Sergiy Fitsak makes seven trend predictions over on Finextra:

• Embedded Finance
• Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) Momentum
• Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Maturity
• Rise of Super Apps
• Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) Challenges for Banks
• AI-Powered Personalization
• Open Banking Expansion

Bernard Marr at Forbes focuses upon:

• Generative AI In Fintech
• Sustainable Finance
• Digital And Crypto Currencies
• Customer Experience

In another Forbes article Alexander Radchenko forecasts that 2024 is when “we should gear up to anticipate many kinds of customer-facing and B2B fintech solutions throughout the rest of this year and into next year as businesses take advantage of the many new capabilities of AI systems and machine learning programs.”

UK Tech News predicts that 2024 will be:

• The year of AI implementation
• Pro-consumer fintechs will thrive
• Acquisition slowdown
• Fintechs will embrace biometric

Financial IT reports the main trends will be:

• Fintech’s AI bubble will pop
• The battle between card and QR payments will heat up in Europe
• We’ll see if Consumer Duty has any teeth
• Fintechs will be asked to help standardise ESG reporting
• FCA will be called on to overhaul the mortgage market

Fintech Finance News did a nice round up of the year ahead, interviewing a range of people across the industry and highlighting that “fintech in 2024 is set for [a] total transformative shift, and again is set to be shaped by emerging technologies as these innovative solutions move into the mainstream next year. SMEs, startups and incumbent banks alike will need to adapt and leverage fintech solutions in 2024 to meet rising customer expectations and remain ahead of the curve in the future. Fintech in 2024 looks as exciting as ever, and these developments are establishing a wide range of new possibilities in how both businesses, consumers and regulators manage, use and think about money and wider financial services.”

The Fintech Times also expects a ‘great reset’ and, after a pretty awful 2023, things can only get better.

Meanwhile, IAPP (the International Association of Privacy Professionals) unsurprisingly predict that privacy is going to be a big area in 2024, and that fintechs should be prepared to navigate the following five data privacy and security topics:

• Scrutiny of third-party tracking pixels, other tracking technologies may increase
• Regulators will increasingly expect appropriate use, governance of AI technologies
• Potential mandates around financial data rights
• Data brokers may face new requirements
• New information security, breach response obligations likely

All in all, the common themes seem to be AI, consumer and SME services, cybersecurity and privacy, and the movement of DeFi into the mainstream alongside CBDCs. From my own perspective, I think they all missed on trick: real-time finance.

For me, real-time finance is a huge change to financial services as it means we can manage risk for minutes rather than years. I blogged about this a while ago, and strongly perceive that this is truly revolutionary. The other suprise is that no one mentioned the plans for X to offer payment services in 2024. An oversight?

Anyways, there you go. A round robin of views from all over about what’s important for 2024. Do you agree?