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Keeping up with FinTech
By John Salmon
As consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to digital applications streamlining most aspects of their daily life, they no longer see digitised financial services as simply an added bonus, but now expect to enjoy the same streamlined delivery from their financial services providers as a given.
Meeting this expectation will be a key challenge for financial services providers in 2018. Now, more than ever, providers will need to re-consider how they deliver products and services to customers, and will need to think creatively in order to keep up with the shifting demand for digital services.
This does not apply exclusively to user-facing applications, but also to the technology underpinning financial services and those facing corporate clients. Many banks, for example, are considering how they might use distributed ledger or blockchain technology to improve processes and deliver different products to clients. Use cases range from securities and derivatives settlement; trade finance and supply chain; and securitisation asset tagging and reporting.
Digitising financial products and services presents a number of challenges, and there is a complex web of regulatory hurdles that must first be untangled in order to deliver these new services to consumers. FinTech lawyers therefore have to keep a finger on the pulse of the rapidly evolving regulatory framework, so that they can best assist providers navigate the law and implement their new services and work with wider teams who have deep product knowledge.
