How will technology transform the financial industry in the near future? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Marianna Tessel, Chief Technology Officer at Intuit, in their Session:
There are multiple ways in which technology is transforming the financial industry. Here are few key examples - (1) it creates a level of new visibility and increases the ability to provide insights (2) it adds automation to eliminate work or make tasks easier and (3) it powers the very underpinning of financial transactions.
Technology can give you more visibility to all of your financial data in a timely manner. For example, you can go online and check out your credit score, or see the balance of your bank accounts with a few clicks of a button. AI and predictive intelligence in the financial industry will help users make more educated decisions on cash flow and forecasting. As human beings, we tend to bring our own optimism bias when we think about the future. But technology makes the data available, and keeps you honest so you can make data backed, prediction-backed decisions. It can also be used for scenario planning, and comparing what-if options.
Many financial tasks are manually done or very tedious. Technology adds automation and simplifies tasks - saving us all time and work. People can take a photo of checks and it deposits into their account, as opposed to going to a physical location and depositing it manually in a bank. Another example is tracking and categorizing expenses. No one wants to sit and manually enter and categorize expenses line-by-line, but a machine can very quickly download or scan documents and receipts. Then technology can apply rules and machine learning to continuously learn and improve. Here is a close to home example: it makes compliance easier in taxes where a machine can comb through thousands of pages of rules, turn them into code and a rules-based system that helps users understand compliance and to be compliant.
Technology also powers the very underpinning of financial transactions - it changed how we manage and move money, it provides additional fraud detection and security, and it introduces concepts such as cryptocurrency.
It is fun to see apps demystify financial data, automate tasks and make them easier, and make our financial lives simpler, faster and more secure.
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