2024 was a challenging year for many fintech companies but it also brought a lot of encouraging results for the industry. Today, we’ll talk about the most notable fintech innovations of this year that are ushering in new opportunities for customers and businesses alike.
The fintech landscape in 2024 has been marked by several groundbreaking innovations, equally reflecting advancements in technology and evolving market demands. We will discover the most notable fintech developments, emerging startups and trends through the lens of potential perspectives.
Fneek Offers a Solution to Friend Lending Challenges
Have you ever been in an uncomfortable situation when you lend friends or relatives some money and they forget to return it or do not follow specific terms you agreed upon? Or, perhaps, you have been this friend yourself. A lot of people have, which produced the strong belief that it’s better not to do any kind of business or get into financing deals with your dear ones. However, a newborn French startup called Fneek offers a solution to this problem.
The young fintech company created an app aimed at streamlining loan agreements between individuals and their personal P2P networks. It enables friends, family, colleagues and other trusted relationships to determine, register, and sign loan agreements with customised terms. Loans are transferred to the lender in just a few minutes, with repayments handled through flexible options such as monthly, quarterly, or single installments.
Fneek allows users to set up a wide range of loan configurations, with flexible limits for loan details such as principal amount, duration and interest rate. The entire process is automated and seamlessly managed through the app’s centralised interface. Besides, between-person loans become more formal and may include repayment guarantees like material property, surety, or other agreements to secure the transaction, providing the lender protection in case of default.
Tax Workflows Become Easy With Conversational AI From Wolters Kluwer
Doing taxes is not the easiest thing to do. It involves a lot of complex paperwork even if it happens online. Wolters Kluwer, a more than a century-old firm particularly renowned for its industry-leading solutions in legal research, tax compliance, healthcare analytics, and financial reporting, has introduced a conversational AI feature in its CCH AnswerConnect cloud-based tax research platform to streamline tax workflows. This innovation enables users to interact with the platform using natural language queries, simplifying access to tax guidance and research. The AI tool integrates with existing content and tools to provide quick, contextually relevant answers, enhancing efficiency and accuracy for tax professionals, accountants and financial advisors.
In addition, Wolters Kluwer received the 2024 FinTech Breakthrough Award for its innovative Beneficial Ownership Platform in the fraud prevention and innovation category. This solution helps businesses comply with the U.S. Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), which mandates reporting beneficial ownership information (BOI) to combat money laundering, tax fraud, and financial misconduct. The new platform streamlines the reporting process through a secure, intuitive five-step workflow for both individual and bulk filings. It reduces the risk of errors, supports timely and accurate filings, and offers a centralised environment for managing ownership data updates.
CBDCs Are Evolving Beyond Digital Currency to Multi-Functional Financial Tools
This year, we have seen a significant increase in potential use cases for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Besides simple payments, financial institutions around the world have been experimenting with more complex applications for the technology.
For example, the SWIFT global banking messaging network intends to create a new platform to connect multiple central bank digital currencies (CBDC) to the existing financial system within the next two years. Its initiative is one of the most ambitious ones when it comes to the development of the global CBDC ecosystem.
To test the feasibility of such a platform, SWIFT has launched a significant collaborative project with 38 global institutions, involving over 125 participants and more than 750 transactions. The goal was to demonstrate the potential of CBDCs in digital trade, tokenised asset management, and foreign exchange (FX) networks, highlighting how these technologies can interlink with existing financial systems.
Earlier, BIS’s project Rosalind tested an API platform that central banks, commercial banks, and fintech firms can use to integrate CBDCs into their ecosystems, facilitating the creation of new financial products, like programmable payments or smart contract-based services. Besides, the project team examined the implementation of retail payments using digital currency online, in stores, and offline, using NFC, QR codes, mobile phones, smart cards, biometric devices, and intelligent assistants.
Tribe’s Tech Platform Combines Issuer and Acquirer Processing for Digital Payments
Tribe Payments, the UK-based fintech company focusing on modular, customisable payment solutions, won this year’s B2B Payments Innovation Award at the 2024 FinTech Breakthrough Awards for its innovative platform, which offers both issuer and acquirer processing for digital payments. The white-label solution combines front-end wallet capabilities with back-end banking services, offering customisable, modular APIs, enabling businesses to quickly create and launch tailored payment solutions. Supported payment types for end users include virtual and physical cards, bank transfers, and even crypto payments. The platform also helps corporate clients meet compliance obligations and enhance their digital banking services.
AI Advances Risk Management
This year, financial institutions like Feedzai have been leveraging the capabilities of generative AI to predict and detect novel fraud patterns by simulating various fraud scenarios. This way, their systems can identify and block fraudulent activities faster and more accurately. The given European bank, for example, reported a 60% reduction in false positives and a 20% increase in fraud detection rates since it started using this AI-driven approach.
Feedzai’s fraud analytics solution uses customer transaction data to quickly detect fraud in real-time, minimising the need for complex rules and reducing maintenance time. It combines bank and external data to understand spending habits and provides actionable insights, such as adjusting transaction confirmation methods or warning about scams. The system uses LightGBM to enhance fraud detection by improving data profiling and enrichment, focusing on data quality and labeled profiles for stronger prevention.
All major industry players, like Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT have been adopting some kind of AI-based fraud detection capabilities to improve their services and boost customer trust.
AI predictive analytics is also helpful in assessing credit risks for lenders. Companies like GiniMachine offer no-code AI tools for alternative lenders, enhancing credit scoring models. By evaluating non-traditional data points, the British startup has successfully increased approval rates for loans and reduced default risks.
This technology has unlocked about $1 billion in new lending opportunities, particularly for “thin-file” borrowers, those without extensive credit histories. In 2024, GiniMachine processed over 10 million loan applications, boosting approval rates by 30% and reducing defaults by 25%. Its technology has helped microfinance firms increase loan portfolios by an impressive 50%.
Civic Enhances Blockchain-Based Digital ID Solutions
The utility of blockchain technology goes far beyond being a base for cryptocurrency exchange. In a broader financial world, the innovative tech is often used to add a layer of security to transactions and authorisation processes. One of the notable enhancements in this sphere is the introduction of blockchain-powered digital IDs.
There are a few startups developing the same concept. We’ll take a look at the example of Civic – U.S.-based Web3 identity management company. It created a secure identity verification tool allowing individuals to confirm their identity on blockchain without disclosing sensitive information to multiple entities. This year, the solution got an upgrade with physical ID cards with advanced security features. This way, Civic Pass now consists of three components:
- digital identity pass created via the Civic.me platform and stored in your wallet as a non-transferable token;
- physical ID cards with advanced security features equipped with an NFC chip;
- a hybrid management system that integrates both verification tools, emphasises user control, and enables individuals to manage their identity privately while reducing exposure to risks like identity fraud.
Civic ID enhances security in DeFi by preventing fraud, ensures authenticity on content platforms, and streamlines real-world interactions in banking, education or healthcare while preserving privacy. It empowers users to control their identities and supports innovation for new applications.
Chia Keeps Reducing the Carbon Footprint Associated With Crypto Mining
Positioned as an eco-friendly blockchain, Chia uses a proof-of-space-and-time consensus mechanism that makes it a more sustainable alternative to traditional blockchains. It offers a few tools to manage corporate climate efforts:
- Climate App to enable the self-custody of digital carbon assets, facilitating peer-to-peer transactions and integration with external platforms for data sharing and alert notifications;
- Registry App to streamline the issuance of digital carbon credits for carbon projects while integrating with the Climate Action Data Trust;
- Tokenisation App to convert carbon credits into digital assets on the Chia blockchain.
This year, the network implemented a few key innovations to boost its efficiency. These include cloud services platform which simplifies blockchain application development by providing API access to advanced Chia features like escrowless trades, multi-signature vaults, and peer-to-peer trading. The blockchain also introduced a more scalable and flexible cloud wallet system. It supports sophisticated ownership and custody configurations, key recovery options, and secure signing through select devices.
Bottom Line
In this article, we’ve managed to present a mere fraction of the emerging innovations in the fintech space, as they spring up every day and constantly keep evolving. However, you could already see the main trends and novel applications. Thus, in 2024, the fintech industry met significant innovations across various sectors. We saw a P2P lending app to simplify personal loans, conversational AI for tax workflows and a platform for compliance with the U.S. Corporate Transparency Act. Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) expanded into programmable payments, AI-driven fraud detection and credit risk tools opened new lending opportunities. Civic advanced blockchain-based digital IDs for better security, while Chia reduced crypto’s carbon footprint with tools for tokenising carbon credits. These and many other developments highlight fintech’s growing role in improving financial processes and addressing global issues.
