Investments in digital projects in 2023 will focus on incremental improvements and automation to enable efficiency in payments and fintech.
Most mature companies will remain customer-oriented, and the two key decision drivers for tech investment will be:
- Enhancing consumer engagement by leveraging technology-based solutions, and
- Realizing more internal efficiencies for revenue maximization
With this backdrop, we observe five key technology trends that will continue to make an impact.
Cloud-native computing and containerisation: With continuous advancement in technology, Cloud will continue to drive the future of payments and fintech to the next level. Cloud-native computing will require a conscious cultural and strategic move away from lift-and-shift cloud migration and VM infrastructure deployments.
Within the developer community, there is excitement to leverage cloud-native computing to build the next generation of hyperscale applications. Open-source packages for Kubernetes, Docker, service meshes, immutable infrastructure, and Function as a Service (FaaS) will enable vendor-neutral and ubiquitous applications. Enabling agility and scalability through cloud-native applications also requires integrating CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) toolchain via a DevOps pipeline.
Automation: We have seen the evolution of automation over the last decade, journeying from hyper-automation to intelligent automation. The potential recessionary storm means now is the perfect time to automate and embed intelligence into operational and consumer-facing apps. 2023 will be the year for CIOs to take decisive actions to automate enterprise digital initiatives, a transformation that will help:
- Connect automation islands created in recent years
- Further customer facing automation
- Break silos and evaluate end-to-end business workflows with cross functional teams drawn from business, operations, IT, and data analytics
- Leverage the emerging trend of edge analytics (machine learning and video-based), supported through cloud-native computing
Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP and Natural Language Generation (NLG) technologies will enable the shift to “Zero-UI” based systems. With the dynamic and automated support of conversational and voice-based intelligent agents, businesses will be able to scale up their rapidly expanding customer and employee service requirements.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Building AI applications is becoming easier with the availability of open-source libraries and pre-trained models. However, it is important to ensure there is no negative impact on users and the organization’s brand and reputation as a result of overreliance on AI driven applications. CIOs and Digital Officers will find it challenging but essential through 2023 to deliver financial services at scale through AI-based algorithms.
Web 3.0: There is a lot of hype associated with Web 3.0, which is not yet well defined. 2023 will not be the year when we see this technology starting to make any impact. However, close to Web 3.0 are DeFi applications, which are rapidly evolving into a novel paradigm that allows new kinds of utility that are not possible in the conventional framework.
While we are still catching up with the “next S-curve” in Industry 4.0, it will be worth the time for organizations to look at the complementary Industry 5.0 guidelines to chart a roadmap for their organizations to contribute to society – through sustainable, resilient , and human centric technology innovation.
The author is Vice President – Engineering & Transformation Group, Global Services, Fiserv.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCIO.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCIO.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.
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