While COVID-19 continues to play out an unprecedented upheaval across the globe, businesses will need to tune up the technology to bring some semblance of order to uncertainty, complexity and to rethink and reboot their digital strategies. Mr Padmanabhan Iyer, pens some major tech predictions that will help steer through 2021.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly one of the biggest tech trends at the moment and during 2021, it will become an even more valuable tool to help us interpret and understand the world around us. Customer patterns have changed drastically given the COVID-19 period and will continue well into 2021. This means that machine learning algorithms will become better informed with more data as well as increasingly sophisticated in the solutions they uncover for us.
Digital Integration: Bridging the physical and digital
As the digitalization trend continues to accelerate, the potential for optimizing processes, making data-driven decisions in real-time, and creating new products, services, and business models will be the key that guides an organization’s efforts. Realizing the full promise of digital may require integrating systems and data across entire ecosystems. The more data one feeds into a digital ecosystem, the more detailed, dynamic, and valuable the digital initiative becomes.
In the digitisation space, from a vertical perspective, payments & remittances will continue to have accelerated growth. Digital onboarding has picked up pace in 2020 considering the social distancing required in view of the pandemic. This trend will continue as well. Micro, small and medium enterprises will be the focus area from digitisation perspective.
Automation
The urgency and need for automation technologies, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), AI, and machine learning, are stronger now than ever before. And the COVID-19 pandemic has made such automation solutions undeniably urgent. The democratization of automation would make these solutions easily accessible to all and when this concept becomes a reality, organizations will certainly see a massive business transformation. Automation often requires extensive human participation and support. Thus, democratization will give companies sufficient access to automating mundane tasks and empower non-tech users. However, every new approach comes with a set of challenges, and the democratization of automation is no different. By developing and following a systematic framework, businesses can address such complexities with ease.
XaaS (Everything-as-a-Service)
As-a-Service (aaS) has already become the standard to turn into a truly digital-native enterprise. The new pattern in the aaS model as Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) where services delivered will totally dwell on the cloud with virtual access to nearly everything. Tools, for example, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a critical part in building those services or expanding existing services to go beyond the digital-native status quo.
Open Banking
Open banking is reported to have generated $7.29 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $43.15 billion by 2026. Open Banking will become the norm with even emerging markets rolling out regulations. This will fuel innovation in the fintech space addressing the New to Credit segment. Fintech as a service platform will emerge enabling banking as a service. This trend will be seen across the BFSI segment with multiple use cases that are evolving on a day-to-day basis.
Augmented & Virtual Reality (AR & VR)
AR & VR will evolve with use cases in businesses beyond the entertainment industry. The fact that they can create large simulation environments and the collaboration further with Artificial Intelligence will stimulate innovation. 5G technology will accentuate the use of AR/VR with better user experiences with shorter latencies.
Regulatory Aspects:
The enormous growth in the digital space puts equal focus on the regulatory aspects. Firstly, RegTech is gaining importance to ensure compliance is made simple with the required analytics in place. This also helps the entities to focus on growing business where RegTech will enable required support for regulatory aspects.
Secondly, there is a growing concern on ‘Security & Privacy concerns’ that needs to be addressed comprehensively with cybercrime increasing day by day. According to Gartner, by 2023, 65% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under some kind of modern privacy regulations.
