For those tired of hearing that this is "The Year of Blockchain," their patience will be rewarded soon, according to one industry insider.
Faisal Husain, Synechron
"There has been all this hype around blockchain, but we do believe that 2018 will be the first year of live work for the technology, except for bitcoin which everyone knows," said Faisal Hussain, co-founder and CEO of global consultancy Synechron during a Nasdaq Trade Talks interview.
The lowest hanging fruit to be the first to adopt distributed ledger technology within the fintech ecosystem will be trade-finance, debt indications, and post-trade settlement, he noted.
Although other use cases outside the financial services vertical, such as maintain land titles and other tasks, will make headway this year.
"Blockchain will become mainstream in the next five to ten years," he said. "It will take time, but it will become mainstream."
Over the same period, Hussain expects significant advancements in the field of artificial intelligence, which financial services firms will be able to leverage.
"Right now, we are in the early days of AI," he noted. "It is being used for basic automation of existing processes. From this year and onward, you will see companies leverage advanced cognitive solutions to perform fraud detection, anti-money laundering, customer analytics and generating natural language through a machine."
In the meantime, financial services need to create the necessary data science capabilities to understand and predict client behavior.
"You need to know who is going to buy a house in the future so that you can sell them a mortgage before someone else does," he added.
