https://medium.com/@fadithomasalaji/abcds-driving-fin-tech-db0986b1ddee

During the last few years, alternative finance has been slowly transforming the offering of financial services and the providers of such services in two main ways. New business models and new technologies. It’s critical to understand the four key and interrelated technologies that have allowed alternative finance to flourish. These can be known as the ABCDs driving FinTech, namely, artificial intelligence, or AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and data.

Banks for the longest time have relied upon and generated a tremendous amount of information. These include information from and about customers, their identity, their transactions, their net worth and even their relationships and location. Yet, in the old times, a lot of this was gathered by using paper forms filled by customers and bank staff and not easily searchable or manipulated for analysis. The digitization of information from paper into data, from written to digital ones and 0's means that such information can more easily stored, transmitted, searched, processed, analysed and displayed. This digitization allows for online capital marketplaces to be more easily created and operated where gatherers can more cost effectively process and analyse the data for those who need the capital. Then they can display the relevant information on the new platforms for the potential providers of capital to make their own investment decisions. At the same time, digital form filling and tracking of the online customer activity allows both these online platforms as well as, virtual banks and e-brokerages to scale more quickly with less manual labour and space resources. Customer data includes online behaviour such as the time and location of logging in and transactions as well as, other online activities such as web browsing, e-commerce and social media use. Increasingly, offline behaviour is also being tracked through data from internet of things for IoT devices such as wearable smart watches, smart cars and smart home devices such as Amazon Echo. For example, in the world’s biggest retailer, Walmart, 2.5 petabytes of data is processed every hour. One petabyte or pb is 10 bytes with 15 “0”s afterwards. Customer data has been called the new oil that is being bought and sold by gatherers and users and increasingly fueling the AI engine.