BFC Bulletins Monthly News Digest
During his speech at the 9th FinNext Financial Innovation Forum, Oleg Chanchikov (senior director for innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa in Russia) outlined the main FinTech trends to follow going forward from the perspective of decreasing customer acquisition costs and improving lifetime value. He broke these trends into 4 main groups:
- Traditional finance trends – there is an increasing value on services that add value for consumers as more and more players fight over a limited market. As such, traditional finance trends are focused mainly on:
- Strengthening ecosystems
- Focusing more of innovations
- Growing domestic FinTechs, startups and near-finance companies
- New Sales channels and monetization models
- Consolidating the concept of ‘finance’
- Community banking trends – banking products designed for specific groups are becoming more popular. These growing community banking trends include such things as:
- Banking products for the unbanked and underbanked
- Banking products for large social groups (e.g. children, retirees)
- Integrating regularly-used services with financial products
- Using social user portraits
- B2B and account-to-account trends – the cost of attracting customers as compared to the profit they bring are currently out of balance. Therefore, we are likely to see changes related to:
- Non-banking B2B services intervening in financial products
- The ‘humanization’ of nanobusinesses and microbusinesses, meaning a greater focus on people and less of an emphasis on organizational and legal forms
- Strengthening close-loop and pseudo close-loop solutions
- Increasing competition for access to account-2-account infrastructure and the start of a PISP/AISP boom
- Digital buy now, pay later trends – while competition in this segment is not yet particularly high, it is growing. Moreover, it speaks to the overall FinTech trend of client-centric products and services. We can expect to see financial players:
- Focusing on improving user experiences, especially those related to onboarding and expanding merchant networks
- Strengthening the presence of non-bank and other regulated players
- Scaling a subscription or pseudo-subscription model to mass product categories
- Growing buy now, pay later options available in e-commerce
These are just a few of the trends to keep an eye on over the next year or two. Additionally, we can expect some new innovations related to:
- Electronic know-your-customer procedures
- Digital currencies
- Cross-border financial services (not just transfers)
- Remote or combined work and education
- Use of data products
- Increased users engaged in the ‘gig’ economy
- Open API and open finance
