FinTech Landscape: Synergy and Disruptive Innovation in Investment Banking

By Mr. Kunal Sawhney, CEO at Kalkine

While technological leaps seem to be defining brighter future for some businesses in the post-COVID era, FinTech continues to thrive and transform the landscape of financial services industry. It is about staying ahead of the curve in this race against grabbing a bigger chunk of market amidst shrinking consumer and business confidence – as adoption of advanced technology can be the secret sauce in attracting and retaining customers in the digital era.

Asset management, insurance and lending companies are some of the prominent segments in the broader financial segment that have very swiftly embraced the latest digital technologies. Looking at Investment Banking (IB) space, while COVID-19 pandemic initially brought the sector to its knees, latest trends in financial technology adoption seem to be getting them back on their feet, driven by advanced and streamlined offerings pertaining to M&A advisory, risk management and financial assets management.

In general, we have heard about versions – Fintech Version 1.0 & Fintech Version 2.0, but the modern theory around investment using financial technology does not end here. There is a multitude of factors that can push and prod the IB thematics while channelising the way technology can slither through and give a spin to each and every product and service in Investment Banking space. Tech-based end-to-end models appear to take things one notch up when it comes to dealing with risk profiling, lending, fraud analysis, payments etc. Let’s look at how this is made possible in today’s world:

AI Technology Penetration – The ‘New Normal’: Penetration of Fintech in IB models is charting out new growth prospects for the financial services industry, ensuring cost optimisation of due-diligence, enhancing value for M&A prospects, streamlining legal checks and advancing asset-reporting discrepancies in acquisition deals. Besides, AI-empowered actuarial software is providing a firm nudge to offering top-notch, faster and accurate risk advisory services.

Moreover, seamless utility and penetration of AI and ML in algorithm trading, stock market prediction, fraud detection and prevention, acquisition of new customers, risk profiling and network security deserve much applause. Amidst COVID-induced market volatility, technology-enabled valuation models play an important role in carving out future stock predictions and aiding sound investment decisions.

Big Data Analytics Driving Value-Based Offerings- IB players are increasingly adopting big data models in evolving and providing advanced offerings in terms of building customer-centric asset portfolio valuation models, offering trading and investment support, risk advisory and M&A support. Meanwhile, big data is also leveraged to optimize internal processes such as automated customer support, salary optimization, attrition modelling, fraud analysis, credit/operational risks, etc.

Besides, the concept of algorithm trading seems to be gaining wide acceptance across major IB players in ensuring efficient execution of financial trades and robust investment decisions without human intervention.

Empowering revolution in the IB space, adoption of unique predictive models, sophisticated statistical techniques and ensuring privacy and integrating of data is crucial here. Specific set of challenges needs to be carefully catered to, in order to ensure that big data boosts competitiveness and support deeper market penetration.

Robo Advisory – The Next-Gen Frontier: Robo Advisory engages high-tech algorithms and provides secure, faster and self-service functionality via online investment management platforms. As per market experts, asset under management using Robo Advisory is expected to grow multifold in the post COVID era.

With minimal manual efforts, Robo Advisory allows automatic adjustments and rebalancing of the portfolio allocation based on algorithms and pre-defined investment rules. The investments are entirely automated and have self-learning algorithms, while the cost of running a robotic automation tool is far less than doing the same work manually.

Cash Less Transactions – The Immediate Future: With increased comfort and safety associated with online cash-less transactions amidst current health crisis, IBs are able to improve and augment existing products and services, in addition to developing new business models. While social distancing is becoming a new normal in the coronavirus era, financial advisors appear to be harnessing the fruits of tech transformation and heightened cashless transactions.

Undoubtedly, banking giants that are fast in adopting digital technologies have an edge over their peers. However, the biggest challenge for FinTech is data privacy, as transactions that go digital are highly prone to cyberattacks. Nevertheless, digital transition may see emergence of a digital-first model in the near term, ensuring radical shift in the value proposition offered to clients, with an ever-increasing emphasis on digital toolkits and electronic market access. All in all, it’s how firms refine their transformation objectives, evolve from the lessons learned from the pandemic and review their broader strategic agenda.