FinTech Trends for 2019: Insights from Ant Financial ATEC Summit

In January 2019, Ant Financial hosted the ATEC City Summit in Shanghai, gathering more than 20 financial institutions to forecast fintech developments for the year.

CEO Jing Xiandong likened the future of finance to tap water—ubiquitous and instantly accessible—underscoring the accelerating convergence of technology and finance and a shift toward an omnipresent, “nowhere” digital ecosystem.

Experts highlighted open banking as a key innovation, noting its potential to transform customers into users, move from closed to open models, and foster platform economies, especially as 5G and the Internet of Things mature.

Artificial intelligence and big data were identified as core drivers of fintech innovation, with advances in deep learning and edge computing making AI practical and pervasive across consumer services, investment research, and user profiling.

Smart advisory remains in its early 1.0 stage, but AI is expected to deepen its role in investment analysis and feature extraction, boosting productivity in financial services.

Infrastructure discussions pointed to the emergence of a “mobile core” for banks, expanding core functions beyond traffic to include processes, marketing, operations, and risk control, while also exploring programmatic trading, AI integration, shared data sets, and knowledge graphs.

Blockchain was projected to enter everyday scenarios such as cross‑border payments, supply‑chain finance, e‑invoicing, and judicial evidence, with layered architectures and cross‑chain interoperability forming the technical foundation for scalable adoption.

Other institutions, like China Life Pension, expressed intent to leverage big data, blockchain, and AI to digitize the pension industry and build a trustworthy ecosystem.

The article concludes with a visual summary of the 2019 fintech trends identified by Ant Financial and its partners.