Some Research Themes For Financial Services In 2022 (Plus A Survey You Can Take To Help)
We’ve been diving deep into a number of topics that financial services executives and their teams care about (or should care about). Here are just five of the topics we find particularly interesting:
- Embedded finance. A crop of fintech startups and large financial providers are investing in embedded finance — in which financial products and services are implanted in (and operate automatically on) nonfinancial platforms, technologies, or products. Some believe the role and impact of embedded finance will rise dramatically in the next few years.
- Open banking and open finance. Open finance enables secure, consent-based sharing of and access to financial capabilities, data, and account information for wider integration and collaboration between authorized third parties from financial and nonfinancial industry sectors. The shift toward open finance is already moving forward in Europe and other markets, even as the effects on financial services companies — and how they’ll approach open finance — remain uncertain.
- Sustainable finance and ESG. How can banks, brokerages, insurers, and other financial institutions (FIs) ensure that their products “[meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”? To what extent are financial providers taking environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainable finance seriously? These are just a couple of the questions we’ll tackle in this research.
- Financial well-being. Many traditional financial providers are finding that their interests no longer align with those of the customers they serve. To remain competitive and drive growth, some firms are pursuing a values-based business model, putting customers’ financial well-being at the core of their strategy. Our research will examine how leaders at financial services firms are approaching their customers’ financial well-being.
- New competitors and challengers. Fintech has had a huge decade with massive funding, eye-popping valuations, and impressive customer growth. Will fintech’s rise continue? Are we in a fintech bubble? And how will incumbent FIs approach the opportunities and threats from fintech companies? What about the tech titans moving into financial services? We will evaluate how leaders at FIs think about fintech, tech titans, and other emerging competitors in financial services.
As part of this work, we’ve launched a survey of leaders at financial services companies. If you work at a financial services company, we’d love to hear from you about these and other topics. We invite you to take the survey by clicking here:
And after you take it, we’ll provide you with a summary of the key findings and highlights.
Again, just click here to take the survey.