The Financial Services industry is in the midst of widespread disruption as they experience both phenomenal growth and unprecedented competition. What key change drivers are pushing this disruption? Will traditional financial service providers be able to keep up, or will disruptive competitors take the lead?

In the past, North America and Europe may have been considered the homeland of financial institutions. However, as globalization increases and smartphones revolutionize access to the internet, this focus is shifting. Strengthening

Financial services firms have been on the leading edge of technology adoption for decades, starting with the pneumatic capsules you can use at drive-up bank windows to make deposits or withdrawals, followed by credit cards starting in 1950, and the automated teller machine in 1967. The innovations since then have only accelerated as technology has evolved.

While many feel like we’ve been talking about

Before the 1970s, and this is actually very hard to imagine today, it took at least a day for a transaction to register in a bank account, because each bank branch had its own servers. The data from each branch wasn’t synched until the end of the day, after all transactions had been completed. As mainframes and telecommunication capabilities became more available, banks were among the early adopters of these technologies, revolutionizing that paradigm.

These changes created what we now refer to as core banking. Core (