Ten Trends for Financial Services in 2014: Big Data, Big Clouds, Big Mobile, Big Brother

Javelin’s senior analysts identify 10 trends that are transforming financial services, evaluate the implications, and map out action steps in 2014 for banking, payments, mobile, and security strategists. In 2014, Javelin predicts: 

• The industry will double down on “photo banking.” 
• P2P transfers will open the door for payments upstarts. 
• Delays in the transition to EMV will set back not only chip-based cards but also NFC payments and efforts to shift fraud liability to merchants. 
• Banks will accelerate efforts to mine “big data” to improve customer service and to enable third parties to provide targeted offers, promotions, products, and services. 
• Mobile wallets stressing privacy over innovation will lose ground to the Gang of Five — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and PayPal. 
• FIs will recognize it is time to pull the plug on text banking. 
• Bluetooth low-energy beacons will transform the shopping experience and threaten to cut out FIs when it is time to pay the cashier. 
• Employees will unwittingly put their companies at risk and trigger a regulatory backlash by storing or transmitting business data and intellectual property in the public cloud. 
• The “share economy” that enables consumers to share rides, rent rooms, and solicit crowd-funding will expose slow-moving FIs to another onslaught by disruptors. 
• Security advantages in smartphone and tablet apps will concentrate mobile fraud at smaller FIs that rely on browser-based mobile banking. 

The consumer data in this report is based on information collected online from several Javelin surveys that targeted populations representative of the overall U.S. population in proportions of gender, age, income, and ethnicity, with the margin of sampling error at the 95% confidence level:

• 5,641 U.S. adults in March 2013
• 3,285 U.S. adults in July 2013
• 3,213 U.S. adults in September 2013