Understanding Fintech, BlockChain and AI technologies ; it's future and it's impact on BFSI sector

Fin-tech, as the name suggests, finance and technology, seems like a simple word, but its not. This is bound to be the next big thing. Our lives and jobs will depend on it sooner or later.

Fin-tech means, financial technology as a part of any process which includes some business related transactions. E.g when money from your card is auto-deducted, upon arrival at your location in a cab. We have been using various types of Fin-tech services without internet too. Example :-

USSD – e.g *121# used to recharge/check phone balance is one which requires no internet.

NUUP – National unified USSD platform, started by National Payment Co-operation of India. NPCI, that brings together all the banks and telecom service providers in india, and can be used without internet. Hence benefitting all the villages and towns, where internet access is not at hand.

AEPS – Aadhar enabled payment system, another initiative by NPCI, which will enable user, to pay using his aadhar card/ biometric scan/ retina scan, giving liberty to the user to not carry his/her wallet.

These ideas put into practice by the indian govt. proves that, fintech is taking over our world with a rapid pace and we are ready with our infrastructure towards it too.

To understand this, we need to know augmented reality. AR is the technology that will assist such transmission. With new technologies in the field of AR, we can expect it to change certain industries like

MARtech– market and AR tech, collaborating all the data related to your need of the product. It will discover, make you aware about it and will learn your evaluation process and then see how you select the final product based on your buying patterns. With tech instilled into your daily lives, we can say we have a better future ahead.

EDtech– education and AR tech is already a big thing, but will certainly take over how we will study.

PROPtech– property industry, is soon being taken over by AR e.g google cardboard in which you can actually see a home without being there, that can revolutionise the hotel industry, as to how they show room to their customers via pictures or architects, so that they can show their creativity to their clients, before the actual room is made.

further more examples are CONtech.

Block chain, is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography, a process in which we can encrypt a plain text into a code or decrypt a code to a plain text using a specific key/password.

The process is very safe, and there’s no room for fraudulent in this. When we think about block chain, It’s not just related to bit-coin. There’s a lot more to it. We can see this technology taking over our transactions, in near future in our banks, in our daily lives with the usage of AI along with it.

Blockchain uses a DLT, distributed ledger technology, making it 3rd leapfrog advancement in the record-keeping technology. It started with double entry book-keeping( debit and credit), and then, spreadsheets (MS- excel). We can see various crypto currencies using block chain to maintain their book keeping, such as bit-coin, ethereum and many more.

Block chain is a series/line of transactions, one after the other, you can imagine it more like a straight line of pearls, in which each pearl can pass a whole once and then the process continues.

It’s future is Block DAG (directed acylic graph, a mesh based system, can be imagined as cube, in which transaction will happen from all the nodes, instead of just one pearl at a time.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Artificial intelligence is the machine’s ability to learn and replicate our actions, its human intelligence imposed in a machine, so that we can save our regular chores and be more productive with our thinking, which is hard to be replicated by any machine.

It has two main parts :-

Prediction of future events and forecasting of outcomes (acting like human)
Inference and understanding of structure that leads to a better design (thinking like human)

To explain it, it will predict based on your habits and patterns, that what will you buy at the super market, when you enter, and rest of your purchase will be based upon that. It will create an output based on number of inputs it gets, about your habits and patterns, thus making life in future very easy.

The above explained technology is Artificial Narrow intelligence (ANI), that is based on the number of inputs you can derive an output.

But, the future of AI is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that will learn like humans learnt from alphabets and will make sentences on its own, i.e will derive actions based on self learning. E.g a clone of yours, that will work parallel to you on different assignments thus increasing your productivity to 200%.

To sum it all, the future holds a better version of today. We shouldn’t be worried as it will disrupt businesses or to where will it lead to our jobs, but it will create more and more avenues in which, there will be massive employment. Such as making machine learn the data and patterns of humans.

Better tomorrow awaits!