Financial Technology Reimagined in the Cloud
Banking is no longer somewhere you go, but something you do. Imagine going abroad, and the night before your flight, you paid off all your traveling expenses via a direct transfer on your mobile phone without ever leaving the comfort of your home.
This isn’t too farfetched anymore with digital money transfers and online services like Paypal which utilize cloud computing technology. Today, online networks have replaced transferring, exchange, payment, and physical banking all together. Kickstarter in raising funds, has taken what was once a one-channel-at-a-time task to a multi-channeled fundraising platform. Likewise, financial institutions are now investing and partnering with QCT when creating their next generation networks that contain the latest financial technology (FinTech).
Banking 3.0 and FinTech
Banking 3.0 is a concept that disrupted traditional banking at the end of 2012, and caused banks to begin using FinTech to create new channels to deliver their services in the digital world. But this wasn’t as simple as giving legacy processes a digital facelift and assuming a bank had met the needs of the growing number of people that could forego going to a bank altogether. Financial institutions had to provide their customers with frictionless digital banking — giving them what they need, from whichever channel or device they prefer, all with ease and speed.
Today, FinTech and cloud computing have become building blocks to layout a future foundation for traditional banks to survive. The most pertinent example is a ledger concept called blockchain, which was originally used to track Bitcoin; but can be applied to other banking functions in way that reduces infrastructure costs and increases efficiency that almost every global bank is experimenting with it to gain the benefits. According to CNBC1, in the beginning of 2017, Bank of America had already filed 15 blockchain related patents. Furthermore, Wells Fargo2, ANZ, and Swift had developed and tested a blockchain prototype for cross-border payment at the end of 2016. Fortunately, this paradigm shift works in QCT’s favor, because large financial entities like Goldman Sachs in the USA have already mentioned their interest in blockchain in the past and are already invested in our hardware. Produban in Spain, which handles the IT infrastructure for Santander Bank; and E. Sun Bank in Taiwan are also QCT’s clients. Hence, as FinTech continues to evolve to what some may call Banking 4.0 or 5.0, there are growing opportunities for QCT to leave a mark in the financial services market.
1 http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/28/bank-of-america-is-going-big-on-blockchain-plans-to-file-20-patents.html
2 http://www.coindesk.com/wells-fargo-anz-blockchain-prototype-banking/
