The financial sector has always adopted the latest technologies and breakthroughs in order to better serve its customers. The innovations that banks and other financial juggernauts implement have trickled down into aspects of daily life, making once revolutionary and high-tech apparatuses commonplace and an integral part of doing business. The next generation of Fintech and Insurtech is already shaping up to be another upending of the way business is conducted throughout the world and industry leaders are excitedly preparing to transition to the new future.
Open innovation ecosystem EarlyBirds is helping businesses in the Fintech and Insurtech industries benefit from the innovations in their respective domains. Readers can find out more about EarlyBirds by heading over to its website at earlybirds.io.
The financial system deals with the flow of capital between individuals, governments, and businesses. Fintech is the underlying technology that makes the flow possible. It has evolved from manually maintained ledgers before the 20th century to high-speed databases that became prevalent during the internet age to bleeding-edge technologies of the 21st century such as the decentralized blockchain. Insurtech refers to the use of technology to collect data and create data models that are capable of assessing the risk of assets and investments to give companies the ability to maximize profits from the coverage they offer.
The financial sector has always adopted the latest technologies and breakthroughs in order to better serve its customers. The innovations that banks and other financial juggernauts implement have trickled down into aspects of daily life, making once revolutionary and high-tech apparatuses commonplace and an integral part of doing business. The next generation of Fintech and Insurtech is already shaping up to be another upending of the way business is conducted throughout the world and industry leaders are excitedly preparing to transition to the new future.
Fintech can refer to advancements in both software and hardware. In some situations, it is an amalgamation of both that opens up uses cases that were previously deemed too difficult to successfully implement. Technology also opens up a slew of new markets, such as those from developing economies, that had been excluded from the digital revolution. Examples of this newly achieved synergy can be found by perusing the list of Forbes’s Most Innovative Fintech Companies of 2021.
MoCaFi, a mobile-first banking platform is helping address the spectre of financial inequality by serving Black and Hispanic communities that have traditionally had less access to banks by providing them credit building and personal finance tools. The company can attribute its business model to the ubiquity of the smartphone and the desire of underserved communities to be a part of the growing digital economy.
Hippo Insurance is modernizing Insurtech by using AI and accessing vast untapped sources of public data and fusing their inferences with modern data sets such as satellite imagery and readings from smart home devices to streamline the home insurance application and claims process. Hippo Insurance has received over $700 million dollars in funding since its inception.
Fintech and Insurtech have also seen the rise of companies that make clever use of existing data to provide investment and insurance services that would have required a considerable time investment in the past. SoFi, an online personal finance company from San Francisco which was selected as a part of Forbes Fintech 50 in 2015, offers student loan refinancing, personal loans, and mortgages to young borrowers. The company also offers its own robo-advisor, SoFi automated investing, that makes investment decisions for its users without charging management fees. Ethos, a company headquartered in San Francisco has been using predictive technology to quote term life insurance rates in under 10 minutes. It verifies applicants’ self-reported data by validating it against their actual medical and pharmacy records.
EarlyBirds founder Kris Poria talks about the opportunities available in the Fintech and Insurtech domains by saying, “We are on the cusp of a new revolution in the Fintech space. What is cutting edge today will be trivial tomorrow. You don’t want to miss out on the jump to the future as it is going to happen at warp speed. The future, according to us, is going to see many new startups and scaleups that expand the reach of technology into developing markets that did not enjoy the benefits of the last few decades, essentially skipping generations and moving directly to digital payments and personalized money management. The blockchain is another candidate for disruption as the rise of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets in its ecosphere such as NFTs have seen a meteoric rise in public interest in recent years.”
Readers can head over to the EarlyBirds website to find out more about its innovation ecosystem and how its network of innovators and subject matter experts can help existing businesses get ready for the impending upheaval.