This month at The Fintech Times our focus switches to reflection as we look back at developments over the last 12 months. 2022 has certainly been a challenging year for everyone with global economic activity experiencing a severe slowdown, with inflation higher than seen in several decades.
Throughout this week, our community of fintech CEOs and leaders have shared their thoughts on this year’s major fintech trends. Today we hear from Revolv3, FinregE, Happy Mango, Detected and Jifiti.
Revolv3
Former professional race car driver Robert Podlesni is now CPO at Revolv3, a fintech startup that specialises as a full stack SaaS payment orchestration and optimisation platform.
Considering the evolution of SaaS payments and subscription billing, Podlesnii shares trends which have come to light during 2022.
“One of the top trends during 2022, in the payment space, has been the increased visibility on payment performance and the impact companies are seeing from macroeconomic stresses. With looming economic recessions and stresses in overall collection rates, revenue, and churn have pushed companies to embed financing options, payment alternatives, and increase vertical, and horizontal reach. Many of these changes include migrations to more modern tech stacks to support these changes.
“One size doesn’t fit all and it’s becoming more apparent even outside the enterprise space. We now look at designing payment systems with a microscope. Businesses are ditching the ‘jack of all trades’ mentality when it comes to service providers and are realising the value they can leverage from tailormade solutions.
“Data is complicated, messy, and time consuming. The proliferation of use cases for machine learning and artificial intelligence has driven the need for more granular, cleaner, and consistent data that maintains compliance and privacy protections.”
FinregE
Rohini Gupta is a director and lead regulatory advisor at FinregE, a company she co-founded in 2018 to deliver regulatory interpretation and compliance workflow solutions.
For Gupta, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in analysing data used by financial services institutions has accelerated in 2022.
“Financial institutions receive a huge amount of data from their customers – from customer calls, to how they interact with their apps for services. In addition, financial institutions need to also keep on track of the numerous existing and changing regulations and laws that apply to them and ensure they are complying with their requirements.
“Machine learning and AI, a subset of data science, can offer improved efficiency, greater accuracy, and better insights into all data-led aspects of a company. Machine learning and AI technologies are used to deliver regulatory technologies or regtech.
“Regtech can help find non-compliance with regulations and laws. AI and ML within regtech can also help automate repetitive tasks, and monitor data security. Research is already showing that companies adopting regtech are seeing cost savings through the bottom line.”
Happy Mango
Kate Hao is the founder and CEO of Happy Mango, which provides a forward-looking consumer credit assessment algorithm that is used by banks and credit unions. She highlights the popularity of ‘fintech for good’ in 2022.
She explains: “To reduce racial wealth gap, the financial services industry made financial inclusion a priority. Fintech is being used to help disadvantaged communities gain access to affordable financial services, as digital banking apps effectively deliver banking services on a smart phone even if one lives in a ‘banking desert’.
“Green financing is putting more energy efficient consumer products into more households. With online lending, EV and solar loans have become stable offerings at many banks and credit unions. Digital payments and alternative credit tools are helping thousands of refugee families displaced by war and conflicts resettle at their new homes quickly.”
Jifiti
While BNPL for consumers has been growing rapidly over the past few years, the original use case for BNPL was business financing. Fintech Jifiti powers point-of-sale financing for banks, lenders and merchants. Its CEO and co-founder Yaacov Martin observes that B2B financing is becoming more accessible, immediate and embedded.
“In 2022, we saw enablement technology moving into the spotlight. Due to macroeconomic conditions, the financial ‘balance sheet’ nature of fintech companies has taken a back seat. We’ve also seen a shift to B2B BNPL.
“Based on the hyper market growth of the last few years, the BNPL market has become somewhat overloaded. Because of this saturation, new opportunities have arisen and customer expectation has caught up to B2B. The demand for business BNPL is rising, as business buyers are also consumers themselves, and are used to buying as a consumer and receiving financing at the click of a button.”
Detected
Liam Chennells is the founder and CEO at Detected – a fintech that automates onboarding for enterprise payment businesses.
Detected fills the know your business gap in the payments’ technology stack with a ‘Find Company’ algorithm that aims to find any registered company globally.
He says: “Major fintech trends we’ve seen this year include the rise of embedded finance, the evolution of payments technology with open banking reaching more than six million regular users, the wider adoption and application of blockchain technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and an increased need for frictionless customer processes, such as onboarding.”
