The Fintech industry has faced changes during 2020. During the Covid pandemic, fintech became a significantly more important part of global society as many of the traditional ways that individuals and companies handled their financial dealings were disrupted. Additionally, fintech companies played an important role in distributing aid.

Important changes that fintech underwent in 2020.

In the US, Fintech Companies Provided Vital Support for Small Businesses Affected by COVID-19.

In April, the United States government made the decision to approve Paypal, Intuit, and Square as participants in the US Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provided forgivable loans to small businesses that kept all employees on their payroll for at least eight weeks.

Fletcher Group told Finance Magnates: “The digital, contactless payment trend is pushing the envelope on payroll”. “The COVID-19 pandemic drove a huge increase in the number of people who want to pay in digital, contactless ways, and experts expect this to continue long after the pandemic is over.”

But the contactless payment trend is not just about cards that do not have to be swiped or inserted, it is also about a decrease in the use of cash across the board.

As such, “this trend is not only impacting a large portion of the workforce, including 14.1M U.S. adults who are still unbanked and locked out of these payment options — it’s also impacting their employers,” Fletcher Group added.

Another of this year’s most important fintech trends has to do with a human connection. Engineering a “Human Touch” into Fintech Platforms Is More Important Than Ever

Indeed, Mike Rhodes, partner at full-service CPA firm, Citrin Cooperman, told Finance Magnates that before COVID-19, “there were high expectations as to how AI could streamline customer experience through chatbots and their ability to complete increasingly complex customer requests and increase customer purchasing of financial products.”

“AI chatbots did not achieve the adoption rates that were originally expected as we entered 2020,” he said.

The Fintech industry is growing rapidly along with Blockchain technology.

XcelTrip truly believes — the year 2020 is going to be the exponential growth year where more use-cases will be added including Restaurant Reservations, Transport Services, Entertainment, Tours and more. It doesn’t stop here, instead, it’s the beginning of disruption! Looking at the current state of the blockchain eco-system, we feel that the most prudent, practical and tactical way to design and architect the system is to adopt a progressive decentralization roadmap. Instead of building on a scalable but centralized platform like EOS, we feel it is prudent to stay the course with a decentralized platform like Ethereum.