In the face of heightened ransomware threats, U.S. financial firms and other equity partners will increasingly invest in financial technology (FinTech) firms, as they must mind their compliance demands in the coming year, according to industry experts.
According to Jennifer Pavlov, director of trade operations for EquityBee, a platform for helping people exercise their stock options, “Regulations in the FinTech industry are outdated.”
Know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) will increasingly be managed via digital channels, Pavlov said, “rather than meeting in-person, to accommodate the state of the world with regards to the pandemic, but also to provide the industry with much-needed updating and automation.”
In the same vein, FinTech funding will hit “record highs,” according to Oded Golan, chief product officer of EquityBee, who predicted that the forthcoming Stripe IPO “will be the biggest IPO for a FinTech company. They will also get very favorable multipliers.”
Indeed, André Ferraz, founder and CEO of Incognia, believed these emerging financial technology and cybersecurity startups will see continued popularity in the face of growing financial digital access and transactions.
“We’ll see the heightening need [this year] for zero-factor authentication (0FA),” said Ferraz. Zero-factor authentication will give mobile financial users more security by removing the need for the user’s input to prove their identity, leveraging device and location intelligence to authenticate users with no friction, distinguishing trusted users from fraudsters to prevent account takeover and fake accounts, Ferraz explained.
Similarly, PerimeterX co-founder and CTO Ido Safruti said that as cybercriminals increasingly “find ways to bypass login checks, it is necessary to implement additional checkpoints that provide broader visibility and control over account activity.”
