The Big 7 2019: Regtech, Cybersecurity, Payments, Insurtech, Blockchain, AI and Financial Inclusion

We asked 9 industry experts to contribute their thoughts on the year ahead, and a common theme was the need for these technologies to mature, with the genuinely useful implementations finally getting to market. Expanding on last year, we have chosen seven areas of interest to focus on in 2019. Each represents a vital area of innovation in the financial industry, and has a particular relevance to Luxembourg's thriving financial technology ecosystem. Each week we will be choosing one of the topics to focus on, both in the content we share on social media, but also in a dedicated newsletter looking at the top five stories from that week. First, let's introduce the topics with some of our favourite summaries for the uninitiated: "Regtech growth will explode in 2019 because regulators worldwide will start truly driving it. Multiple countries will hold a joint hackathon at midyear, aiming to use technology to remove one of the biggest regtech blockers: how to share data widely to find risk patterns and fight financial crime, while fully protecting privacy and cybersecurity. Solutions will solve myriad regulatory problems. Even more importantly, the shared experience will move regulatory bodies into a new era of active innovation and collaboration with each other, industry, and academia. Anti-money laundering will continue to be a leading use case, because the current system is so broken and costly and there's so much low-hanging fruit to harvest through technology. We'll also see AI and blockchain solving more problems, from digital identity and financial fairness and inclusion to API-based regulatory reporting, machine-readable regulations, and even machine-executable compliance. These regulatory breakthroughs are not just nice-to-have. They are essential, if fintech innovation is to flourish. The regulations are the rules of the road we're all traveling."