MARCH 20188IN MY OPINIONOpen PlatformsThe Future of FintechWNew York headquartered Thomson Reuters enable professionals in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, and media markets to make the decisions that matter most, all powered by the world's most trusted news organization.e are living in an age when an idea can progress from paper to reality almost overnight to become the "new normal." People used to Xerox a document, now Amazon is the new shopping hub and Uber is the disruption which has changed the face of public transport. While it is difficult to predict what the future of financial services will be like a decade from now, the sector will continue to be driven by cutting-edge technologies such as open platforms, or open API (Application Programming Interface).Three years ago, Gartner, the world's leading research and advisory company, predicted that by 2016 75% of the top 50 banks in the world would open their API and 25% of these would have app stores for customers. Today, embracing an open platform strategy has become crucial to a fundamental shift in the financial industry landscape.An open platform is a plug-and-play business model that allows multiple participants, including producers and consumers, to connect and interact with each other, and create value beneficial to all stakeholders. A key characteristic of a well-designed platform is that it can be programmed through APIs and is consistent in common operations such as authentication, authorisation, data models and entitlement.An example of a robust Open Platform is Salesforce, the American cloud computing company, which has software, content, third-party developers and an entire ecosystem of app developers. It allows users to perform key functions and integrate its own sales data with that of other potential third-party data. Once you have embedded it into an organisation, it is powerful, scalable and hard to replace. It is imperative for financial services companies to follow suit and innovate by adopting open platforms. But how can open platforms drive effective innovation in financial services? Here is a checklist.1. Consumers Demand InnovationCustomer demand has led to various disruptions in retail space leading to a host of digital and mobile applications which are fairly intuitive and can intelligently tag people, places, events, and cater to various financial services in-By Bharat Rathod, Head-Market Development, Financial, Thomson Reuters, South Asia
< Page 7 | Page 9 >