This week's blogs are inspired by our global connector Marisol Menendez Tell me about Responsive and what you guys are all about? We're an advice-centric FinTech that's focused on financial advisors with better decisions and actions, that helps them grow customer wealth and loyalty. We do that by performing behavioural analytics on data and providing the advisors with insights in real-time. For the time being, that's the model we believe in. At this stage, we think that's just too valuable a process to be left to automation when it comes to the complexities of life and the weight of these decisions.

Banks have been struggling with the concept of being more personal with their customers. 'Banking for Humanity', a concept explored by fintech guru Chris Skinner, is considered as a remedy for this; with new banking technology innovation spearheading the way for banks to adopt a human touch and be more empathetic. Chris Skinner stated that the concept is about "how banks can make their services more human". According to Skinner, there are five primary aspects for discovering Banking for Humanity: financial literacy, financial inclusion, financial wellness, financial capabilities for the vulnerable, and promoting sustainability. However, with the aftermath of the financial crisis earlier in the century, lack of confidence and trust is prevalent amongst customers.

I was talking with a senior banker, who told me that he was in charge of the Artificial Intelligence program in the bank. I was impressed as he is part of the executive leadership team of the bank and not the CIO. We have invested widely across the board in AI, he told me, and achieved great results. Sure, I hear that a lot. How many people have you laid off as a result?

This report is the culmination of one year's worth of research, including over 200 interviews with subject matter experts and seven global workshops, prepared by the World Economic Forum, and the full report can be downloaded here.

If you didn't catch the big news of yesterday, it was the first public firing of a robot. Amelia was launched last year by Swedish bank Nordnet, with the aim of speeding up customer onboarding and improving customer satisfaction. Apparently, she achieved neither and so was sacked for underperformance. It's interesting as the software behind Ameila, IPSoft, is an award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) engine that is also used by Swedish bank SEB. In tehri case, they got an award for their deployment and the nuances of Amelia's sacking in Nordnet implies they didn't train her properly.

I don't often blog about investment banking as it bores my readers who are cool and trendy retail bankers and geeks, mainly, but keep coming back to this article about JPMorgan's Best Execution AI engine, LOXM. LOXM's job is to execute client orders with maximum speed at the best price, by using lessons it has learnt from billions of past trades -- both real and simulated -- to tackle problems such as how best to offload big equity stakes without moving market prices … JPMorgan believes it is the first on Wall Street to use AI with trade execution and said it would take rivals 18 to 24 months and an investment of "multiple millions" to come up with similar technology. The reason I keep coming back to it is that best execution is a critical regulatory requirement, argued over extensively by the big bods of the European Union a decade ago when they were introducing the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, MiFID. What the regulator wanted was a method to ensure that investment banks gave customers the best deal, but how to define what the best deal was became a big issue. Is the best deal the best price?

There are two big tech topics in banking these days, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain. These two tech titans are changing the back office of banks into intelligent shared structures that will be mind-blowing a decade from now. I've written a lot about Blockchain, and feel that it's a slow-burn as it needs an awful lot of agreements before it will come to fruition. A bit like Brexit, Blockchain has too many counterparties involved in agreeing how it will happen, which is why it will not be until the next decade that we really start to see this technology transform clearing and settlement. Short-term, sure, Blockchain technologies or, rather, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) will have an impact in bilateral arrangements but that will be piecemeal compared to the transformation that will come when it can replace paper-based identities with digital ones.

By 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual- and voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%. Gartner has found that voice-based search queries are the fastest growing mobile search type. Voice and visual search are accelerating mobile browser- and mobile app-based transactions and will continue to in 2018 and beyond. Mobile browser and app-based transactions are as much as 50% of all transactions on many e-commerce sites today. Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft's investments in AI and machine learning will be evident in how quickly their visual- and voice-search technologies accelerate in the next two years.

Without a doubt, 2016 was the year'disruption' became tangible. Events like Brexit, the U.S. election and India's demonetization exercise brought home the reality we are living in a fast-changing global society where a sense of anti-establishment and rebellion is accelerating change. This shows no sign of stopping in 2017, with new technologies allowing banks to offer service levels more synonymous with hospitality than financial services, and with established technologies like artificial intelligence and robotic process automation seeing a resurgence in combination with new voice commerce models, IoT data, and robo advisors to offer more personal, more contextual and ultimately unique banking experiences for each and every one of us. In meeting with decision-making executives from the U.S to Europe, the Middle East, India and Singapore, I have compiled a clear list of trends that are dominating technology investment discussions across the globe's leading banks. In 2016 we already saw several leaders' like DBS, Santander, Wells Fargo and Bank of America roll out their chatbots, but 2017 is the year when the rebirth of this very old technology will come into its own.

Chris Skinner is surprised when he hears that he's popular among bankers. Surprised because the messages he delivers are often uncomfortable. Skinner intends to push bankers out of their comfort zone. While never a banker himself, Skinner has worked on banking projects for several technology companies before establishing his niche as a fintech blogger (TheFinanser.com) His specialty is discerning relevant chords amid all the noise regarding technology and its impact on financial services.