The financial industry seems to embrace technology. Often, when new tech emerges, you’ll see it operating as part of the financial world before it appears elsewhere.
In this article, we’ll talk about financial technology examples that you can learn about and use right now. If you don’t know about these yet or have not tried them, now might be a suitable time to give them a shot.
Crypto Trading Apps
Crypto trading apps are places where you can invest in crypto. You can buy, sell, or trade it. BlockFi is one of the more prominent ones.
BlockFi is an app where you can trade crypto forms. You can invest in some of the more popular ones, like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The app has an easy-to-use interface that lets you see what assets you hold there at any moment.
You can leave your crypto there if you don’t plan to trade it for a while, and it will accrue interest, just like cash would in a traditional savings account. For example, BlockFi currently gives you 4.5% APY on Bitcoin. That’s pretty generous, and you can expect that return regardless of whether Bitcoin rises or falls on the open market while you’re holding onto it.
Mobile Banking
Most banks have mobile apps at this point. In fact, you will likely not find any that don’t have an application, even the smaller, non-national ones.
Ally Bank is one example. Ally does not have any physical locations. That does make it somewhat of an anomaly in banking circles.
The system works well for them, though. Since Ally does not need to spend money building or renting physical spaces, they can pass the savings on to customers with higher interest rates on savings accounts, CDs, and so forth.
Ally’s mobile banking app lets you do things like deposit checks using a mobile format. You can check your account balances, request loans or lines of credit, or just about anything else you could do at a physical bank location. If you need to talk to someone, you can call a customer service representative through the app as well.
Digital Credit and Lending
You can now look into lending or credit allotments in a digital format as well. For instance, look at Kabbage, the fintech giant. They fund small business loans that you can apply for through the app or on their website. You no longer have to go to a bank and speak to someone there.
Kabbage can grant you a loan, or not, based on transactional data. You answer some questions, and the system can determine whether you’re a suitable loan candidate almost instantly.
Then there’s peer-to-peer lending, which is more popular than ever these days. You can use an option like Lending Club if you want to borrow or lend money to your peers. Users can loan each other money to use in business ventures without involving banks or credit unions.
Mobile Payment Options
Like mobile banking, mobile payment options are now widespread and easy to use. If you’re part of one of the younger generations, like Gen Z or a Millennial, you will probably prefer to pay for things using mobile apps instead of utilizing a credit card or carrying money around.
Peer-to-peer services like Venmo allow you to do that. You can learn how to use them easily enough, and you no longer have to take cash when you go out. That should make you feel safer.
Mobile point of sale transactions now numbers in the billions every year. That number should only go up as more time passes and more individuals embrace this technology.
AI for Commodity Trading
Mobile trading is on the rise. AI technology exists and forms big data’s backbone. This is a fintech that uses natural language processing. You have AI that can shift through massive data sets and tell you how to trade in a way that’s much more exact than anything that previously existed.
If you use this AI to extract insights from data, you’re less liable to make a mistake in your finances, especially if you’re trying to invest long-term. As a trader, you can run data sets through these AI programs and identify both trends and potential risk factors.
Fintech is big business, and there are always new forms of it hitting the market. Look into the ones that we’ve mentioned if you haven’t done so yet. Many of them are convenient and pretty easy to master.