“Removing Roadblocks: The New Road of Fintech” identifies four key elements critical to the future development of fintech - relevance, openness, automation and data.

• Relevance – organisations across the spectrum will need to understand their purpose and how to deploy technology to serve their customers

• Openness to partnership and cultural candidness, including a firm grasp of the new dynamics of competition

• Automation – understanding how, when and when not to automate processes

• Data and it’s use and value either as a profit pool or a source of purpose

Fintech Disruptors 2019 surveyed 5,000 industry professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The report also provides strong evidence of a seismic shift in industry focus, away from new payments technologies and towards open banking and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in fintech.

Findings from the report include:

• Only 37% of respondents cited payments as a major future investment area for fintech, compared with 71% in 2018.

• 57% identified AI, automisation and digitisation as a key future investment focus, with more than half also citing open banking as a major area for investment.

• Established financial institutions are twice as likely as fintechs to deploy sophisticated data mining and interrogation techniques to their customer data.

• Surprisingly few (10% of those surveyed) use customer data to try to interpret what further products customers would like.

• 41% of fintechs say they use AI techniques in their business, compared to 43% of financial institutions.

• Banks expressed record levels of interest in purchasing white-labelled fintech products for rebranding and use in their business (46% vs. 33% in 2018), and also in acquiring fintech companies (45% vs 22% in 2018).

• Interest in partnering with fintechs, still high at 68% for 2019, but the lowest figure recorded in three years (2017=78%; 2018 = 73%).

• Banks surveyed believe nearly a third of their overall revenues are at risk of being taken by fintechs.

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