Starting off the new year, we like to sit down with our leaders and get their take on what will happen in the new year within the Fintech realm. Today, we asked our COO, Franck Fatras for his outlook:

What trends are you watching around technology for Fintech in 2018?

“From what I’ve seen, the most obvious trend is a continued adoption of blockchain technology. I think 2017 was a proving ground for the technology and in 2018 we will probably see a much broader adoption of it.”

“Blockchain is really interesting as a technology as it’s the most reliable way to keep digital records of secure transactions. Because blockchain is decentralized and distributed, the data in any given block cannot be altered once it’s recorded without the alteration of all subsequent blocks. This kind of tamper-proofing of digital records is unprecedented and should give consumers a higher level of confidence in the security of their data.”

“Second, we should expect to see the “cloud wars.” AWS (Amazon Web Services) is dominating the marketplace, but Microsoft has become the second largest cloud provider. It’s still very far from AWS, but it’s making up ground quickly. While AWS is today’s undisputed champion, who will come up next is still up for debate. Both Microsoft and Google are making significant investments in this marketplace but, there is plenty of room for a newcomer to make some big waves.”

“Lastly, we are going to be looking at the impact of net neutrality going away and what the bandwidth providers will do. How will both consumers and companies be affected? There are a lot of questions to be answered.”