Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, or GAFAM as they are beginning to be know are continuing their move towards financial services; payments have become one area in particular where they have seen the tech giants making inroads; mobile wallets for in-store payments, money transfers between friends and even loans to small businesses; tech giants have only started to disrupt fintech as they look to become bigger players in consumers financial lives. Source.
Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy reports on the potential of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple being the fintech leaders of tomorrow. Source
An article in Bank Innovation explores whether Google’s mobile expansion points to larger fintech ambitions for the company; their Indian mobile payments app called Tez showed growth in the quarter and many companies are moving to Google Cloud including PayPal; Google also opened a payment API in Brazil and is also focusing on partnerships with retailers and merchants. Source
Most significant banks have a mobile app with features that allow individuals to conduct close to their entire banking life on their phones; keeping up with the operating systems from Apple and Google is a challenge for the banks; banks are not as nimble as fintech startups and so there is a lot more detailed of a process to go through when making technology updates; banks have learned that 80% of users update operating systems within the first month of a new release, which puts pressure on the banks to act quickly; talking to American Banker about staying current, Alice Milligan, the chief customer and digital experience officer of Citi's global cards business, said, "This requires us to stay at the cutting edge of device and operating system developments in the industry."; prioritizing what features are most important is key, not everything can get done quickly and this forces banks to make difficult choices; as more people use technology in their financial lives, banks and fintech companies will need to make sure they try to stay ahead of the curve. Source
Google Play has created a guide for developers focused on fintech financial health apps; the guide was created in partnership with the Center for Financial Services Innovation and specifically its Financial Solutions Lab; the guide provides best practices for developing financial health focused apps for Android and distributing them through Google Play; Google Play is also featuring a page with financial health apps. Source
A case study at the Harvard Business School was presented as part of the executive MBA program on the bank’s digital strategy; Goldman CFO Marty Chavez recently stated “Goldman is for risk what Google is for search”; the move to becoming a tech company is not easy as other areas of the bank do not see the same benefits; Goldman is clearly on the front edge of innovation in banking today. Source.
One of the first posts I ever wrote on Lend Academy back in 2010 was about mulling the idea of...
Voice recognition and machine learning technology are combining to offer consumers new services across various industries; in financial services ING has invested $945 million in a digital technology initiative that plans to include voice automated banking services through devices such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home; Amazon Alexa is now working with many financial services clients for voice integration including UBS, LPL, Fidelity, Capital One and Betterment; this week it was also reported that Wal-Mart will partner with Google to offer customers voice directed ordering through Google Home on Google Express. Source
Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet has become CFO Marty Chavez's new mentor at Goldman Sachs; the relationship is part of a new initiative that has Goldman Sachs focused on making its services for risk comparable to Google's services for search; the bank wants to be the leading source for trading and managing risks giving its firm the attention of risk managers that Google gets from advertisers; to do this it has created Data Lake, a machine learning platform that manages information on transactions, markets and investment research as well as communication from emails, voice calls and instant messages; the new internal technology system is based on APIs that connect different parts of the business to the Data Lake central database making its communication processes more efficient. Source
Google's artificial intelligence unit, DeepMind, is using blockchain technology to build an auditing system for analyzing and storing healthcare data; the system will mainly focus on tracking all of a person's hospital health data and centrally storing it for access and ownership by individuals; DeepMind will also make its system available through open source software allowing for the technology to be utilized for broader solutions including auditing identities, financial records and private corporate data. Source