[alert type=yellow ]Every week at Tradestreaming, we’re tracking and analyzing the top trends impacting the finance industry. The following is a list of important things going on we think are worth paying attention to. For more in depth trendfollowing, subscribe to Tradestreaming’s newsletters .[/alert]
1. ‘Slack Finance’: The rise of the message-like interfaces in financial services (Tradestreaming)
What’s interesting about some of the new automated financial services is that they look a heck of a lot like SMS. Will we bank in the future by chatting to bots? Maybe.
2. The financial industry is having its Napster moment (Bloomberg)
Just as Napster and iTunes reshaped the modern music industry, more asset managers are switching from high-priced, actively managed mutual funds to passive, low-cost ETFs and index funds. That’s entirely changing their firms’ economics.
Read also: BlackRock’s ETF golden goose may be killing jobs (Bloomberg)
3. The rise of the automated trading desk (Tradestreaming)
Coming to a trading desk near you. The machines are on their way. It’s no longer enough to employ algorithmic trading — now we’ve got artificial intelligence to tell us which algo to use and when.
4. Welcome to the ‘havoc’ phase of fintech disruption (American Banker)
2 Forrester analysts describe where we are in the financial technology growth cycle:
In the long run, the role of digital leaders at incumbent financial firms will be to embrace digital business transformation and to partner with fintech companies that center on customers’ increasing empowerment and evolving needs.
5. Fintech U.: Leading universities increasingly offer fintech specialization (Tradestreaming)
Will your kids be able to get a degree in fintech? It’s looking more and more that way as leading universities introduce fintech curricula.