The banking industry has undergone some huge changes lately, as an emerging technology has been used to make it easier for us to handle our money. What are the main advances that we now benefit from and what is the technology behind them?
Smartphones and Secure Mobile Banking
It is easy to take mobile banking for granted, yet this is something that has been a relatively new addition to our lives. Once smartphones became popular, the chance to check our balance and make transactions on the move was too good to miss out on. However, fears over the security of mobile banking perhaps caused people to feel reluctant about getting started in the early days.
Therefore, a large part of the success of mobile banking has to come down to the way that security measures like two-step authentication, encryption technologies, and secure apps make us feel more confident about dealing with our finances using a mobile device. This has led to an estimated 169 million Americans using mobile banking and 80% of us saying that we prefer this approach.
The big banks all have their own apps now, while the founding of mobile-only banks has increased our range of banking options. Some of these apps offer electronic bank transfer, as well as a mobile account opening process too, which is where your identity is verified through a video call, photo, or uploaded documents. This has turned account opening into a fast and painless experience that can be carried out 24 hours a day no matter where you are.
Artificial Intelligence Helps Us to Spend More Wisely
The way we can bank using mobile devices hasn’t just meant faster and more convenient access to our accounts. This approach has also allowed us to use applications that offer artificial intelligence (AI) and open banking to find new ways of spending our money more wisely.
Open banking is a system that lets you very easily link all of your accounts to an app, to give an overview of all your financial transactions in one place. AI is then used to analyze your habits and see where you could perhaps save money. Apps such as Plum, Cleo, and Moneybox are among the most popular open banking apps that let us view our spending in a fresh new way.
The Blockchain Cuts Out the Middle Man
The blockchain promises to bring big changes to the way we handle our cash. By using a decentralized ledger, it lets us send us money directly to anyone else anywhere on the planet, without going through a bank or using any other sort of intermediary. Bitcoin is the best-known example of this, but other coins like Litecoin and Ripple are regarded as being excellent ways of sending remittances abroad.
The major banks and other established financial organizations are working hard to make sure that they don’t get left behind by these changes. Many of them have teamed up with cryptocurrencies or else are working to develop their own tokens, like the JPM Coin that is used by JPMorgan to send funds across the world in real-time transactions.
Online Comparison Sites Save Us Time
We are now used to going online to compare the cost of travel packages, insurance, and other purchases. Yet, the use of the online comparison approach also now extends to banking services. This is best seen in the mortgages sector. If you want a quick mortgage decision, you only need to enter a few basic details on a site like Trussle. A decision is quickly reached and you are sent a message informing you of the best deals for your current situation from reputable banks like HSBC and NatWest.
You can also see how this works with life insurance, as comparison sites list the cost and options from companies like Churchill and IAG after you enter some personal details. It seems likely that automated comparison services will become more widely used in the future, as the technology to do so already exists. The increasing amount of automation used in the industry should help to make this an easier task, meaning that you could very quickly look through the options to find the one that gives you exactly what you are looking for.
The implementation of these new types of technology has helped to change the banking industry enormously in a very short period of time. It seems certain that we see more changes coming soon, ensuring that we continue to get new, interesting ways to carry out our transactions that suit our lifestyles.
