Around 3.7 million Australians have been unintentionally caught in an ocean rip. For the unprepared it can be a harrowing experience--but for experienced surfers, rips are a handy way to ride through the whitewash and out to the break. We're not surfers, but we work at Australia's national science agency in "strategic foresight," which you can think of as the study of the currents taking the world into the future. These currents are a bit like ocean rips: they present risks for those who don't understand them, but opportunities for societies, organizations and people who are prepared. We call the biggest currents "megatrends", and in a new report we examine the megatrends that will shape the next 20 years.

Before the pandemic, at the World Economic Forum 2018, Justin Trudeau addressed the audience by saying, "The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again." As we look back, we realize these words couldn't be more true. Even in the past year, we have seen exponential tech advancements and changes in consumer behavior that have eclipsed what had occurred in previous decades. From the pandemic, we are able to see the emergence of megatrends across multiple industries that will impact banking, disrupting legacy business models, and having the potential to improve consumer's financial lives. Some of these megatrends are already well in process, while others are in their formative stage.