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Technologies have improved people’s lives throughout human history, but now there is a turning point — they are not just being integrated into life, humanity itself is being integrated into technologies. They are constantly changing and adapting to people, improving their lives and the world around them.
It should be recalled that Accenture identifies the main directions of technological development for this year:
- artificial intelligence systems as a new user interface,
- ecosystems as a macrocosm,
- staff marketplaces,
- human-centered design,
- “step into the unknown”.
Artificial intelligence systems as a new user interface
Up to 85% of respondents said that they plan to invest heavily in AI over the next three years.
AI can act as a kind of curator, offering a person new opportunities depending on his/her previous behavior (for example, Spotify algorithms which offer listeners new music); as an adviser who not only learns from previous actions, but also guides a person along the optimal path (various robo-advisors); and, finally, as a conductor, learning and taking action in a multi-channel environment to achieve necessary goals (Amazon Alexa).
Among the more than 5,400 executives surveyed in the Accenture study, up to 79% agree that the introduction of AI will accelerate the adoption of new technologies in their companies. Up to 85% of respondents said that they plan to invest heavily in AI over the next three years.
And there are reasons for this, because artificial intelligence makes it possible to increase the efficiency of line staff. For example, IPcenter implemented AI in one of the New York investment banks to ensure the work of first-line technical support engineers, and this reduced the time of responding to a request and correcting IT infrastructure failures to 93%, that is from 47 to 4 minutes.
The introduction of artificial intelligence systems can lead to the beginning of the era of “invisible” technologies, because a person will no longer need to understand complex technological and interface solutions in order to interact with them: it will be enough to talk to them, indicate their purpose with a gesture or touch. AI, which is familiar with the context of interaction and learns on the basis of user actions, makes interfaces completely intuitive.
Ecosystems as a macrocosm
Platform ecosystems represent the next step in the development of ecosystems already built around companies, because as technology evolves, it is very difficult to assemble all the necessary technological competencies “under one roof”. Previously, it was enough for a major player to conduct a marketing campaign and wait for customers, but now a new approach is emerging, when the inlet part of the “funnel” is expanded through partner services built on the company’s open API and interactions with other partner platforms.
More than a quarter of the executives surveyed by Accenture said that platforms are changing the usual way of creating company values.
It is platforms and integrations that are at the head of the new development path. African mobile payment solutions like M-Pesa have long been at the hearing. They allowed a large part of the population to use mobile wallets, but these solutions have a rather complicated integration. It was on this wave that the Pegasus platform “took off”, offering integration with housing and communal services providers, and currently serving up to 200 thousand mobile payments per month of up to $10 million for electricity alone.
However, not every company needs to create its own platform. It is often quite profitable to use ready-made platform solutions, because now it makes almost no difference who owns the platform if it brings you customers.
More than a quarter (27%) of the executives surveyed by Accenture said that platforms are changing the usual way of creating company values. This includes both communication platforms (Telegram, WeChat, and WhatsApp) and AI intermediaries (Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri), all of which make interaction with customers easier and faster. Hyatt hotels use Facebook Messenger to allow their guests to reserve rooms and order room service, and Capital One Bank has developed a plug-in for Alexa that enables people to check the status of their accounts and make credit payments by a voice request.
BBVA Compass uses the Dwolla clearing platform to speed up interbank payments — now they are made almost in real time (comparable to the usual 24-48 hours when one applies the traditional clearing approach).
Staff marketplaces
As the company sets many new goals that match those of its partners, personnel requirements change very quickly, which entails the need to create platforms which provide on-demand labor and online workflow management systems.
100 companies from the Fortune 500 list use Upwork to hire staff for specific projects.
And this is not “hipster stuff” — one of the largest content management companies Automatic (CMS Wordpress, with the capitalization over $1 billion, 25% of the global content management systems market) [KG2] already works with a completely remote team — all 450 staff members are distributed across 45 countries and divided into teams of 2-12 people without the usual managerial level. MasterCard and WorldBank are constantly using the Gigster platform to work with freelancers.
Proctor & Gamble has completed a pilot project with the Upwork freelance exchange. The results are encouraging — in 60% of cases, the required result was achieved faster and cheaper than when working with traditional staff. Moreover, 100 companies from the Fortune 500 list use Upwork to hire staff for specific projects and tasks on request.
Human-centered design
As technology widens the efficiency gap in human-machine interaction, taking into account individual behavior will enhance not only the quality of the user experience, but also the effectiveness of technological solutions, which will in turn transform ordinary personalized relationships into something more valuable —partnership. The functionality of a product alone becomes insufficient to be in demand in the market, and companies have to take into account the context of human behavior.
For example, the financial company Betterment helps investors achieve long-term goals by analyzing and responding to their behavior. One of the tools that help reduce the impact of investor behavior is hiding data on the daily activity of a portfolio in a personal account. This leads to a reduction in losses from the investor’s convulsive actions caused by asset volatility. Instead, a personal account is set up so that the user makes as few decisions as possible, and all of them are aimed at the “long term”. Betterment helps clients set goals, follow them, and make the decisions necessary to achieve them.
And this approach works — over the past 10 years, according to a Morningstar report, investors have lost an average of 1.32% of returns per year due to excessively harsh reactions to volatility, but this figure was only 0.31% among Betterment clients. Such results lead to increased loyalty, and $5 billion in managed assets make Betterment a leader in the automated investment market.
“Step into the unknown”
Digitalization is changing everything from technological standards to ethical norms and legislation. Only one thing remains stable — the understanding that the “rules of the game” have not been settled yet, and those who first start working in a particular sector of the digital market have yet to create them. According to the Gartner’s forecast, in 2020, “companies are either leading the digital industry created by them, or are part of an industry created by someone else”.
According to 65% of IT and senior managers of companies, government regulation doesn’t keep up with the development of technology.
Moreover, new tools and technologies — blockchain, smart contracts, homomorphic encryption — require new rules. By spreading their example to the entire industry, technology leaders gain confidence that the other market players will have to play according to these rules. In addition, new standards make it possible to get rid of the need for external regulation (or at least reduce it). Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft, although competitors in the development of artificial intelligence systems, are working together to create an ethical standard for the development of this industry. This reduces the need to implement such rules “from the outside”, accelerates the development of innovations and protects the reputation of each player in this market, following such rules.
An Accenture study shows that, according to 65% of IT and senior managers of companies, government regulation doesn’t keep up with technology development, and technology leaders need to help the state establish new market rules. An example of this is the Japanese financial industry, the regulation of which limits banks’ ownership of non-financial companies to 5-15%. The regulator considers fintech companies to be technological, not financial organizations, so it is strategically impossible for the Mitsubishi UJF megabank to invest in fintech startups and it is necessary for it to open its own fintech R&D division.
Link to the website: http://bankir.ru/publikacii/20170419/
17 May, 2017
Main directions of technological development of the financial and banking industry
Technologies have improved people’s lives throughout human history, but now there is a turning point — they are not just being integrated into life, humanity itself is being integrated into technologies. They are constantly changing and adapting to people, improving their lives and the world around them.It should be recalled that Accenture identifies the main directions of technological development for this year:
- artificial intelligence systems as a new user interface,
- ecosystems as a macrocosm,
- staff marketplaces,
- human-centered design,
- “step into the unknown”.
Artificial intelligence systems as a new user interface
Being previously just one of the company’s backend tools, AI is beginning to be used as new interfaces for human interaction, from autonomous machines using computer vision systems to automatic translation systems based on neural networks. Artificial intelligence makes any interface both simple and smart, thereby raising the bar for future interaction.
Up to 85% of respondents said that they plan to invest heavily in AI over the next three years.
AI can act as a kind of curator, offering a person new opportunities depending on his/her previous behavior (for example, Spotify algorithms which offer listeners new music); as an adviser who not only learns from previous actions, but also guides a person along the optimal path (various robo-advisors); and, finally, as a conductor, learning and taking action in a multi-channel environment to achieve necessary goals (Amazon Alexa).
Among the more than 5,400 executives surveyed in the Accenture study, up to 79% agree that the introduction of AI will accelerate the adoption of new technologies in their companies. Up to 85% of respondents said that they plan to invest heavily in AI over the next three years.
And there are reasons for this, because artificial intelligence makes it possible to increase the efficiency of line staff. For example, IPcenter implemented AI in one of the New York investment banks to ensure the work of first-line technical support engineers, and this reduced the time of responding to a request and correcting IT infrastructure failures to 93%, that is from 47 to 4 minutes.
The introduction of artificial intelligence systems can lead to the beginning of the era of “invisible” technologies, because a person will no longer need to understand complex technological and interface solutions in order to interact with them: it will be enough to talk to them, indicate their purpose with a gesture or touch. AI, which is familiar with the context of interaction and learns on the basis of user actions, makes interfaces completely intuitive.
Ecosystems as a macrocosm
Platform ecosystems represent the next step in the development of ecosystems already built around companies, because as technology evolves, it is very difficult to assemble all the necessary technological competencies “under one roof”. Previously, it was enough for a major player to conduct a marketing campaign and wait for customers, but now a new approach is emerging, when the inlet part of the “funnel” is expanded through partner services built on the company’s open API and interactions with other partner platforms.
More than a quarter of the executives surveyed by Accenture said that platforms are changing the usual way of creating company values.
It is platforms and integrations that are at the head of the new development path. African mobile payment solutions like M-Pesa have long been at the hearing. They allowed a large part of the population to use mobile wallets, but these solutions have a rather complicated integration. It was on this wave that the Pegasus platform “took off”, offering integration with housing and communal services providers, and currently serving up to 200 thousand mobile payments per month of up to $10 million for electricity alone.
However, not every company needs to create its own platform. It is often quite profitable to use ready-made platform solutions, because now it makes almost no difference who owns the platform if it brings you customers.
More than a quarter (27%) of the executives surveyed by Accenture said that platforms are changing the usual way of creating company values. This includes both communication platforms (Telegram, WeChat, and WhatsApp) and AI intermediaries (Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri), all of which make interaction with customers easier and faster. Hyatt hotels use Facebook Messenger to allow their guests to reserve rooms and order room service, and Capital One Bank has developed a plug-in for Alexa that enables people to check the status of their accounts and make credit payments by a voice request.
BBVA Compass uses the Dwolla clearing platform to speed up interbank payments — now they are made almost in real time (comparable to the usual 24-48 hours when one applies the traditional clearing approach).
Staff marketplaces
As the company sets many new goals that match those of its partners, personnel requirements change very quickly, which entails the need to create platforms which provide on-demand labor and online workflow management systems.
100 companies from the Fortune 500 list use Upwork to hire staff for specific projects.
And this is not “hipster stuff” — one of the largest content management companies Automatic (CMS Wordpress, with the capitalization over $1 billion, 25% of the global content management systems market) [KG2] already works with a completely remote team — all 450 staff members are distributed across 45 countries and divided into teams of 2-12 people without the usual managerial level. MasterCard and WorldBank are constantly using the Gigster platform to work with freelancers.
Proctor & Gamble has completed a pilot project with the Upwork freelance exchange. The results are encouraging — in 60% of cases, the required result was achieved faster and cheaper than when working with traditional staff. Moreover, 100 companies from the Fortune 500 list use Upwork to hire staff for specific projects and tasks on request.
Human-centered design
As technology widens the efficiency gap in human-machine interaction, taking into account individual behavior will enhance not only the quality of the user experience, but also the effectiveness of technological solutions, which will in turn transform ordinary personalized relationships into something more valuable —partnership. The functionality of a product alone becomes insufficient to be in demand in the market, and companies have to take into account the context of human behavior.
For example, the financial company Betterment helps investors achieve long-term goals by analyzing and responding to their behavior. One of the tools that help reduce the impact of investor behavior is hiding data on the daily activity of a portfolio in a personal account. This leads to a reduction in losses from the investor’s convulsive actions caused by asset volatility. Instead, a personal account is set up so that the user makes as few decisions as possible, and all of them are aimed at the “long term”. Betterment helps clients set goals, follow them, and make the decisions necessary to achieve them.
And this approach works — over the past 10 years, according to a Morningstar report, investors have lost an average of 1.32% of returns per year due to excessively harsh reactions to volatility, but this figure was only 0.31% among Betterment clients. Such results lead to increased loyalty, and $5 billion in managed assets make Betterment a leader in the automated investment market.
“Step into the unknown”
Digitalization is changing everything from technological standards to ethical norms and legislation. Only one thing remains stable — the understanding that the “rules of the game” have not been settled yet, and those who first start working in a particular sector of the digital market have yet to create them. According to the Gartner’s forecast, in 2020, “companies are either leading the digital industry created by them, or are part of an industry created by someone else”.
According to 65% of IT and senior managers of companies, government regulation doesn’t keep up with the development of technology.
Moreover, new tools and technologies — blockchain, smart contracts, homomorphic encryption — require new rules. By spreading their example to the entire industry, technology leaders gain confidence that the other market players will have to play according to these rules. In addition, new standards make it possible to get rid of the need for external regulation (or at least reduce it). Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft, although competitors in the development of artificial intelligence systems, are working together to create an ethical standard for the development of this industry. This reduces the need to implement such rules “from the outside”, accelerates the development of innovations and protects the reputation of each player in this market, following such rules.
An Accenture study shows that, according to 65% of IT and senior managers of companies, government regulation doesn’t keep up with technology development, and technology leaders need to help the state establish new market rules. An example of this is the Japanese financial industry, the regulation of which limits banks’ ownership of non-financial companies to 5-15%. The regulator considers fintech companies to be technological, not financial organizations, so it is strategically impossible for the Mitsubishi UJF megabank to invest in fintech startups and it is necessary for it to open its own fintech R&D division.
Link to the website: http://bankir.ru/publikacii/20170419/
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