Guest Author: Michell Zappa (@michellzappa), Tech futurist and founder of trend forecasters Envisioning Tech

Technology and finance advance in lockstep. Our very notion of money and particularly currency are themselves technological creations which have evolved and mutated over millennia, and have proven resilient against contrary efforts of displacing them. Ours is a monetary culture, and the nature of scarce natural (and human) resources requires money to trade hands in order for progress to continue.

The financial sector is remarkably prepared for the rapidly changing nature of said technologies. Despite the monolithic size of most financial institutions, these organizations tend to embrace and incorporate top-end transformations. But their challenge for today’s incumbents is not dealing with large scale technological shifts, but rather learning how to keep pace with the thousands (and potentially millions) of nimble, single-purpose startups that are rapidly outsmarting the big players.

Take a look at this infographic on where we see the future of financial technologies headed:

Click here to view/download the full size version as an image or here for the pdf

This visualization was researched and designed by Michell Zappa and Simon Cox exclusively for SWIFT’s Innotribe

The visualization attempts to gauge the technological readiness of the financial industry as a whole. While looking at trends that are likely to influence the very notion of value in the coming decades, we try to establish a baseline of whether organizations are paying enough attention to the imminent changes that will define the future of society or if they are running the risk of letting accelerating change vanquish existing business models.