In the next ten years, the wave of emerging tech-nologies will be sweeping through all industries and will have transformed the financial services sector, due to changes inside and outside of the industry. It will be accompanied by a fundamen-tal reimagination of banks and insurers, which is ultimately rooted in a variety of developments.
This will affect banks through their customers who will expect to not have to interact with a bank, or any other financial service provider for that matter. Individuals and organizations alike will stop sorting through the details of financial products or invest time in navigating the custo-mer care jungle, which will dramatically decrea-se the brand’s visibility. Personal AI assistants will enable individuals to outsource organiza-tional tasks almost entirely, leaving banks to interact with and cater to a digital gatekeeper.
Secondly, automation will shift the context and the nature of financial services. It will impact the entire economy to shift towards service-dri-ven value generation, where financial transac-tions manifest on a different level, not as isolated purchases but as interconnected reiterations of payments for individual solutions.
Autonomous vehicles will be one of many exam-ples of this shift. They will be perfectly suited to solve the individual problem of mobility, of get-ting from point A to B as quickly, directly, and affordably as possible at any given time, without the added constrain of purchasing and maintai-ning a vehicle. This will trigger a massive shift from ownership towards usage affecting all ad-jacent financial services.
Once centralized fleets are established as the dominant form of mobility, consumer credit for purchasing or leasing a car will no longer be necessary, including subsequent credit agree-ments, liability insurances, car insurances, and adjacent insurances. Consumers will only rent a vehicle for a certain amount of time or milea-ge. However, the need for financial services will not disappear. In fact, new services will appe-ar, mediating between the vehicle and service providers such as telecommunications, software vendors, screen producers, telecommunications companies, and, of course, insurers who will in-sure a fleet and features of a vehicle’s interior. Consumer interaction with financial services will take place twice: payment of a mobility flat rate and payment of additional interior services or features. This illustrates how financial ser-vice providers will still play a prominent role in a service-driven economy even though the con-text and specifics are changing dramatically.
This example reveals how the industry is facing a collective and often underestimated challen-ge that will cause a fundamental disruption to the topography of competition. Competitors like challenger banks and ambitious tech giants are ready to pounce on the opportunity to redesign and redefine the market in their advantage and to dominate it by providing financial services designed to uniquely address the needs of a ser-vice-driven economy.
Furthermore, the direct impacts of emerging technologies like machine learning, distributed ledger technology, and even quantum compu-ting, but especially their potential synergies in financial applications will dramatically upset the structure of the financial system in the next 10 years. AI assistants, IoT, brand evolution, digital currencies, platforms, data security, pri-vacy by design, and new regulations, as well as new competitors, will all have interconnected long-term impacts worth dissecting in detail.
Therefore, this study aims to provide a clear picture of financial services in 2030 to enable a discussion and to provide practical strategies for financial service providers to be successful in the future.
