The Future of Technology (1/2)

It’s already been 10 years since The Great Recession of 2008.  It caused a massive lay off and it just swept the world into global panic about the future, especially the young and ambitious millennials unable to get their first employment. However, it gave way to the unconventional financial services which emerged and are disrupting the traditional financial services like crowdfunding, P2P funding and Kickstarter.  Now millennials are able to invest their capital into meaningful projects, sparking a new trend of investment like a social investment.

According to the giant audit firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), they came up with a recent report showing what traditional financial services would need to keep up with the disruptions.  Kickstarter and Indiegogo already disrupted the traditional mortgage services and venture capitalists to invest in startups and other social enterprise projects as well as raising funds for your medical bills with Indiegogo.  By the year 2020, financial technology will be the future.

With the rise of the robo-adviser like Stashaway and Smartly, which allows its users to invest a small amount of money, you can expand your wealth and even build your investment and wealth portfolio based on the algorithms.  They are highly based on individual customisation which is the preference of the millennials and Generation Z. Those two financial technology firms are startups looking for their niche where most probably the millennials, who preferred cheaper, are in the higher income brackets based on the international survey by WEF. Also, the newly elected Malaysian government leverage the power of crowdfunding which was the P2P lending to allow millennials, or the ‘homeless generations,’ to purchase their first home. According to one Senior Vice President of J.P Morgan, he stated that the financial technology would eliminate a lot of manual work which is done by the teller clerks and the mortgage service processing clerks.

The most intriguing technology will be the blockchain. No one really knows about blockchain, which is the foundation of Bitcoin. When Satoshi published his white paper, his agenda was clear, to break off the monopoly of the centralised financial system at the Central Bank — the bank that allows rich and powerful CEOs to do as they want. 

The power of blockchain has gone up since the Bitcoin boom; and shortly after that, people wanted a piece of the pie, even the traditional banking system like J.P Morgan. They wanted to invest in blockchain just like Goldman Sachs also wanted to invest in blockchain and a platform for crypto trading where it was enough to crash the Bitcoin and other crypto prices. Luckily, that turned out to be a hoax.  Blockchain is a distributed ledger network and a decentralise network, however, bear in mind that not many distributed ledger technologies are built on ledgers or blocks like blockchain is.