Among many other industries, the metaverse has sparked a desire among financial innovators to learn how FinTechs and banks can provide financial services in this entirely new world. The Metaverse is about to create new business models that could lead to the emergence of crypto as a large-scale alternative financial system.
Other large companies and smaller FinTechs are also looking to develop digital worlds. These types of digital financial ecosystems can support activities and transactions in the metaverse.
The Metaverse is a convergence of our physical and digital worlds that is being brought on by advancements in internet connectivity and blockchain. It’s a combination of multiple elements of technology including virtual reality, augmented reality, and video where users live within a digital universe. Supporters of the Metaverse envision its users working, playing, and staying connected with friends through everything ranging from concerts and conferences to virtual trips around the world. It has been described as an even more immersive and embodied internet where you're going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine: get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, and create. as well as an entirely new category that doesn't really fit with how we think about computers and phones today.
Judging by Facebook's latest moves in payments, we suspect that they will look into the blockchain to power transactions in its metaverse. Another element worth mentioning are NFTs: Twitter, amongst other giant online platforms, plan to let creators share the NFTs on its platform by connecti ng their crypto wallets. NFTs could let creators sell their content without intermediaries and can build online communities, a key feature of a metaverse. As Facebook and Microsoft position themselves as the gatekeeper to their own metaverse, FinTech startups could benefit from integrating their solutions into their ecosystems. Alternatively, larger fintech players may explore creating their own metaverses. Coinbase's upcoming NFT marketplace for example will include personal feeds based on each user's interest to help connect them with like-minded users and creators.
As you may have noticed all of this ties in with decentralized finance as the regular banking sector is nowhere to be seen in the metaverse. Instead, decentralized finance or Defi solutions that leverage blockchain technology are taking off within the metaverse. If conventional banks continue to remain absent in this space the momentum of people living in the metaverse is only expected to increase. And DeFI will surge just based on a number of transactions increasing multi-fold. Right now, each metaverse platform so far has tried to use a different cryptocurrency.
What we are curious about today is what impact YOU think this all to have on the FinTech industry? Share your thoughts down the comments below.
If you’ve even moderately kept an eye on any payments related news source, there’s no way you have not been bombarded with the Buy Now Pay Later craze in 2021. Almost all the widely known payment players in the field who could partake in the BNPL craze… actually did. We are quite sure that you have heard about the likes of; Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay, but industry Giants such as Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, Square, Monzo, Revolut, Amazon, and even Walmart, are all offering BNPL options at checkout or are partnering with BNPL companies to offer this service to their customers. Even mighty Apple is climbing aboard.
Apple’s push to secure a spot in the payments ecosystem is still going strong. Or at least that’s the plan — executing on it may be … well, not that simple. This is because Apple has been making moves to build a network of merchants, among the most critical components of the payment value chain … with functionalities that are already out there in the market.
As competition in the payments ecosystem is riling up between traditional and challenger banks, reshaping core systems and technologies of traditional banking is long overdue. When talking about future-proofing banks and financial services, the term Banking-as-a-service is starting to come up a lot. But what is banking as a service all about and how is it reshaping the industry?