The 24th installment of Oliver Wyman's The State of Financial Services research is available at: The Tectonic Shift Between Risk, Data, and Technology. The report highlights the significant shift taking place as data and technology drive faster growth in new capital-light services, with a different set of winners to date. And this shows up in the structure of the industry — nearly a third of the top 50 financial institutions are now data and technology firms rather than regulated balance sheet firms, up from just two a decade ago.

With climate data, digital wallets, embedded finance, digital identity, digital assets, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and the Metaverse all taking root, Oliver Wyman sees the scope for growth in capital-light financial services as huge. The firm sees many attractive growth avenues for big tech, data, technology, and infrastructure firms in financial services.

The response from the incumbents in financial services — banks, insurers, and asset managers — will be fascinating to watch in the coming years. This challenge of how to manage mature, asset-intensive businesses while trying to grasp opportunities in high-growth technology and data services is prevalent in many industries such as autos, energy, healthcare, and telecoms — and in most, the answer, increasingly, is a more decisive structural pivot of the organization to drive greater focus on the new areas.

How the landscape evolves next is far from certain. With rising interest rates, shifting customer trust, and market skepticism on tech valuations, the next 10 years could be very different from the last 10. As always, Celent is here to help you sift through the technology and data-related opportunities at hand and to navigate the tectonic shifts on the financial services horizon.