The synergy between finance and technology has enabled several exciting developments in the world of banking, giving rise to a new buzzword called “FinTech.” According to a Global FinTech Report prepared by the PWC in 2017, the promising nature of FinTech has prompted over 77 percent of the financial institutions to adopt sophisticated technologies, such as blockchain, as a part of their production process in the next two years.

82 percent of the financial institutions are expected to increase their FinTech partnerships in the next three to five years. The report also predicts that these firms would receive an annual ROI of over 20 percent on FinTech-related projects.

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An area where FinTech has impacted the most in banking and financial institutions is customer service. Unlike the past, where service personnel manually analyzed a customer’s problems to figure out a solution, today, chatbots have become synonymous with customer service. The AI-powered chatbots not only address the customer’s problems but also lend a human touch, thereby leaving a positive impact on customers. Furthermore, activities such as online banking that are constantly enriched with multiple payment options such as money transfer, payments, filing and payment of taxes and so forth, have rendered the practice of visiting a brick and mortar bank, outdated.

Financial institutions are also leveraging technology for fraud detection. The identification and investigation of pecuniary crimes that were predominantly manual tasks earlier have been automated. Fraudulent transactions are immediately flagged and alerted and insights into them are provided by analytics, which helps the senior level executives decide the next course of action. Certainly, the use of technology within the banking and finance arena is set to increase manifold.