The Future of Finance: The Impact of Fintech, AI and Crypto on Financial Services is a consultant-academic-banker-founder-cheerleader mashup to help people make sense of technology’s impact on financial services.
Its co-authors are Henri Arslanian, head of fintech and crypto consulting for Asia at PwC, and Fabrice Fischer, former CFO of A.I. shop Sentient Technologies and now founder of blu, an artificial-intelligence consultancy.
They are both entrepreneurial people who have built their careers in Asia but with a global reach. It’s good to have a textbook with that DNA at its core.
That’s primarily what FoF is, a textbook. It seems aimed at two audiences. The first is students. Universities around the world, and certainly in Asia Pacific, are inventing fintech-oriented curriculums, trying to marry their traditional computer-science or tech departments with business schools.
By “student” I also include people who need to study enough of fintech to “get it” but who may not be directly employed at a tech company – such as journalists, PR and marketing pros, and headhunters. The next junior reporter or salesperson I employ will read, and learn from, this book.
But FoF has its limits. Take the university student. Personally I’m skeptical about a full-blooded fintech degree. How many fintech companies fail because they don’t understand the complexities of financial services? That’s not a problem the authors of this book can solve…but they face the same problem. FoF offers a very good overview of fintech, crypto and AI, and if deployed on top of a deeper dive into finance, it’s useful. But it’s a supplement; students (or journos, etc) treating fintech-related trends as paramount are ill-served without a better understanding of the legacy systems and histories being challenged.
But for students studying things like accounting, business management, and finance, and who want a fintech layer on top, FoF will be useful and probably enjoyable. The writing is clear, not too heavy, and can rise to the challenge of chapters such as “The Basics of Cryptography and Encryption”.
The second audience for this book is people in financial services looking to get to grips with tech developments. Here the book serves a different role, filling in some gaps and helping tie together the bigger trends. The early chapters do a good job of building this context.
The book’s section on explaining crypto-assets is probably its biggest strength: the authors devote considerable time exploring the subject. For people leaving banking for the exciting world of crypto or blockchain, it’s a quick primer. Furthermore, this topic is actually hard for people who are not programmers or techies (that is, most of us). FoF provides a useful explainer that I intend to keep on hand.
Other sections, however, are too generic for practitioners. The section on fintech fundamentals is skimmable; any regular reader of DigFin will be very familiar with these topics. And the section on A.I. is disappointing. Its two chapters are comprehensive in that they define types of A.I. and touch on applications, but shallow.
The challenge for the authors, I suspect, is that a lot of A.I. work in finance is actually quite boring. But it’s also increasingly important. Unfortunately this book’s treatment of A.I. is too superficial to train a future data scientist, but also unlikely to help a future business executive understand the decisions they will face.
I think the A.I. section could have been livened up by providing several case studies to demonstrate how hedge funds, corporate banks, consumer banks, and insurers are actually using the tech and its variants, its successes and failures, and where it’s headed. I’m back to the argument that studying “fintech” (like studying journalism) is actually kind of useless without an underlying domain knowledge.
FoF ends well with a few speculative scenarios that pull together possible futures in which data, A.I. and blockchain technologies are intertwined. This part of the book is the most fun and I won’t ruin it with spoilers.
To sum up: FoF is helpful and welcome. It will serve as a useful starting point for students interested in the field, and can help bring finance professionals up to speed if they haven’t been exposed to these trends. It gets high marks for educating readers on crypto and blockchain, but the section on A.I. falls flat, and the description of generic fintech developments feels cookie-cutter. Ultimately this sort of textbook is like a glass of wine: best paired with a fuller menu of financial history, corporate finance, and accounting.
The Future of Finance by Henri Arslanian and Fabrice Fischer, Palmgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland, 2019, 312 pages.
