12 PwC Global FinTech Report Safe and fast payments are emerging trends 2.3 Asset and wealth management Mobile smartphone adoption is one of the drivers of changing shifts from technology-enabled payments patterns. Today’s mobile-first consumers expect immediacy, convenience and security to be integral to payments. human advice to human-supported In our culture of on-demand streaming of digital products and technology-driven advice services, archaic payment solutions that take days rather than seconds for settlement are considered unacceptable, motivating both incumbents and newcomers to develop solutions that Figure 8 clearly demonstrates that the main trend the asset enable transfer of funds globally in real-time. End users also and wealth management industry is focusing on at present is the expect a consistent omni-channel experience in banking and increased sophistication of data analytics to better identify and payments, making digital wallets key to streamlining the user quantify risk. experience and enabling reduced friction at the checkout. Finally, end users expect all of this to be safe. Security and More sophisticated data analytics as a Mobile smartphone privacy are paramount to galvanising support for nascent forms gateway for emerging trends adoption is one of the drivers of digital transactions, and solutions that leverage biometrics The proliferation of data, along with new methods to capture it for fast and robust authentication coupled with obfuscation and the declining cost of doing so, is reshaping the investment of changing payments technologies, such as tokenisation, are critical components in patterns. Today’s mobile-first creating an environment of trust for new payment paradigms. landscape. New uses of data analytics span the spectrum from consumers expect immediacy, institutional trading and risk management to small notional convenience and security to So what? – Speed up, but in a secure way retail wealth management. The increased sophistication of data be integral to payments. Speed, security and digitisation will be growing trends for the analytics is reducing the asymmetry of information between payments ecosystem. In an environment where traditional small- and large-scale financial institutions and investors, loyalty to financial institutions is being diminished and barriers with the latter taking advantage of automated FS solutions. to entry from third parties are lowered, the competitive Sophisticated analytics also uses advanced trading and risk landscape is fluid and potentially changeable, as newcomers like management approaches such as behavioural and predictive Apple Pay, Venmo and Dwolla have demonstrated. Incumbents algorithms, enabling the analysis of all transactions in real time. that are slow to adapt to change could well find themselves Wealth managers are increasingly using analytics solutions losing market share to companies that may not have a traditional at every stage of the customer relationship to increase client payments pedigree, but that have a critical mass of users and the retention and reduce operational costs. By incorporating network connectivity to enable payment experiences that are broader and multi-source data sets, they are forming a more considered at least equivalent to the status quo. While most of holistic view of customers to better anticipate and satisfy their these solutions “ride the rails” of traditional banking, in doing so needs. they risk losing control of the customer experience and ceding ground to innovators, or “steers”, who conduct transactions as they see fit.