Finance and money are, essentially, a type of communication. As such, they are experiencing a huge amount of change. With our smart phones behaving more and more like financial devices, money is acting more and more like bits, sent and received as easily as a text message. The first and most common impact we're seeing is the arrival of the cashless society. This relatively minor change for individuals accelerates the broader rate of transactions by making selling and purchasing so incredibly easy. This is where we are now, but the prevalence of digital cash opens the door to many more sophisticated changes we can expect soon. For example, charging interest was something that previously only banks could do, but now it is technically quite trivial. This innovation is the foundation for peer-to-peer lending programs, which have hit some roadblocks, but still show promise. P2P lending is just the start of the disaggregation of banking services. Traditionally, the old banks were gatekeepers to many different financial services, but soon we will see more new banks specializing very narrowly in savings accounts only, for example, or perhaps mortgages or investments, but not all of them. Another near-term change we can look forward to is the utilization of dynamic pricing in physical stores, something we already see in online retail. Eventually, we will be able to expand this concept beyond retail into the larger economy as a whole, with real-time accounting, at first for individual companies, but eventually for entire industries and countries, truly macroeconomic-scale visibility. This is one of the frontiers of fintech. Another frontier to explore is the role of A.I. in guiding investment. Another is the possibility of using baby bonds to equitably share the gains of society at large. The frontiers of fintech call us to advance our technical and regulatory abilities, but they also present opportunities to advance our cultural and social values. Tremendous innovation lies ahead in the word of financial technology.
This video on “The Future of Fintech” was commissioned by China Mobile as part of an online course. It is one of 36 lecture videos. A version with Chinese subtitles is available at Citic Migu: citic.cmread.com/zxHtml/listen...
A transcript of the lecture in English is available here: drive.google.com/file/d/1kZpM...