Integrating FinTech innovations, APIs, and open banking frameworks into legacy systems

FinTech encompasses a vast array of technological innovation driving change in the world's financial systems. Innovations are reshaping financial services, including areas like lending, payments, capital markets, insurance, and wealth management. The initial wave of FinTech innovations focused on improving the traditional banking experience by leveraging technology to allow users to handle banking tasks more easily. Startups built products to simplify and facilitate online payments. Similarly, some companies helped drive the adoption of online dining reservations, while others focused on automating expense reporting (Drasch et al., 2018; Gozman et al., 2018; Oliveira et al., 2019).

In recent years, however, FinTech innovations have made more profound modifications to the way financial products are created and offered. Some FinTech companies are replicating investment and transaction banking models – disrupting and decentralizing traditional banks by offering lower-cost products directly to consumers. Others are providing financial services to underbanked populations. At the same time, financial technology has had important effects outside the realm of traditional financial companies. The adoption of social networks has begun to alter the nature of financial products, and advances in analytics and artificial intelligence are pointing the way toward new capabilities for credit scoring, risk management, and automated trading. Additionally, the financial technology ecosystem is rich and varied. Its participants range from established financial companies investing heavily in technology to create optimal products to start-up technology companies aiming to transform particular sectors of financial services into easily accessible online experiences. Through finance-focused innovations, the entire FinTech ecosystem contributes to an era of historic change in the financial services industry (Zachariadis & Ozcan, 2017; Vives, 2019).