The FinGoal team always keeps our eyes on the future of the industry. The telescope we’ve constructed in our office, while capable of looking across great distances, has yet to enable looking into the future. So, we can only look to the present to spot clues about what tomorrow may hold. Here are three guesses, based on current trends.
First, the obvious: Open Banking will change how, and how often, financial data is shared—especially for consumers. This might look like innovation to satisfy regulation, but it will alter the industry.
Open banking makes customer data sharing more secure and transparent. That’s great for the consumer, because it means they have more agency in what data they choose to share, with who, and for how long. It also makes it easier for the consumer to kill any connections they don’t want anymore. These are all great steps to give customers more control over their own data.
But, open banking also standardizes the connection. My guess is that the standardization of financial data sharing will lead to it happening more frequently. As application developers ourselves, knowing that every financial institution shares data using the same protocol makes it easier for us to build generalized connections to FIs.
So, a proliferation is coming. This will create…
Historically, really good banking applications with loads of features have been the sole province of the largest institutions in the country. But, imagine a world where a local credit union has the same tools, abilities, and business intelligence as a tier one FI.
Once upon a time, advanced functionality required massive budget for R&D and/or tons of vendor costs. But Open Banking may change that. If application developers are more easily able to interface with the data of their FI partners, it becomes easy for any FI, big or small, to embed any number of third-party-developed features into their apps.
Suddenly, using tools and APIs built by third-party developers (there’s loads), even the smallest FI can create an excellent consumer banking app. Game, set, match. Playing field leveled. Third sports metaphor.
Of course, all of this will only be enhanced by…
I’m not talking about Chatbots, either - oh, no. I’m sure everyone is very proud of the customer support bot on their dashboard, the one with the quirky name and the winningly indistinct personality. I’m sorry, but what a bore all these chatbots are! Surely, LLMs will have a more profound impact on fintech, right?
Imagine a developer, empowered with an ecosystem of applications running on a single protocol. Now add an LLM-powered integration assistant, say an MCP server (or a whole network of them). New features that would have once taken months to implement and sync with other apps in the environment could take only weeks or days to build. Gone are the days of siloed features and modular frontends, gone are the data silos!
LLMs with more data are just more powerful. So, once expansive environments proliferate, what will developers build? Who am I to say. Advanced data analytics, behavioral predictions, deeper insights? All I know for sure is, it’s not going to be a customer service chatbot.
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