Top 10 financial services and fintech stories of 2023

With spending on IT in the finance sector expected to emerge from the doldrums, we kick off our review of Computer Weekly articles with research from software giant Finastra and its prediction that investment in IT will begin to flow in the second half of next year.

Furthermore, for the first time in a few years, a tech term other than fintech is perhaps the first word spoken when financial services IT professionals talk about the change in the sector: generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).

The past 12 months has seen term rise to the top of the agenda across multiple sectors, with the financial service sector, as a pioneer of tech, unsurprisingly investing heavily. Finastra found that 83% of almost 1,000 global banks are interested in what GenAI can offer their businesses. It’s about improving the customer experience, the banks say.

But while GenAI is the current buzzword, it is just part of the wider fintech revolution, which is maturing by the year.

Also in this yearly review, we feature an update on Visa’s acquisition of open banking pioneer Tink. The payments giant, along with rival Mastercard, which took over open banking fintech Aiia – previously the Nordic API Gateway – have invested billions in the technology. We look at what Tink’s future holds as part of Visa.

Sticking with the evolution of the fintech sector we feature an interview with fintech pioneer Jaidev Janardana, who in 2005 set up peer-to-peer lender Zopa. Nearly 20 years on, the company has morphed into a digital bank. Read about Janardana’s “emotional” journey in an interview with Computer Weekly.

Twenty years is a long time in the finance sector, and the past 20 has seen a lot of change. The biggest event was in 2007/08 when the financial services sector crashed following the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers. The “credit crunch”, as it was known, was not only responsible for the finance sector improving its use of tech, but it was also the breeding ground for future talent, when tech experts were brought in to fix it.

One such talent is Goldman Sachs’ chief data officer, Neema Raphael. He told Computer Weekly in an interview that he made his break, during the crisis, in finance tech as part of a team creating a database to help the company understand its exposure to risk.

It’s not just investment banking giants that are leading the way on adopting the latest tech since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, as the UK’s Nationwide Building Society demonstrates. For the past decade and a half, the mutual society has been digitising its business, with many a tech milestone reached.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Nationwide’s payments director, Otto Benz, talked about its latest generational transformation project, which will see it migrate of its payments to a cloud-based software platform.

Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 financial services and fintech stories of 2023.