Finance is at the heart of any economy — those providing credit, holding deposits among other services. Closely related is the insurance sector — activities focused handling the risk for when things go wrong. Businesses who undertake any of these activities are placed in Industry Division K. This division includes organisations undertaking financial transactions, the regulation of financial activities, and those offering financial protection. Whilst the prominence of physical cash in transactions is receding, flows in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars occur each day. And, like other industries, financial and insurance services are continually changing. That is what this article is about — change. What could happen in terms of careers and business in this industry. It is a futurist’s take on how things might pan out over the next 10 years or so.
Specifically, though, for the purposes of this article the future of this industry is viewed through the lenses of climate change and computerisation. For these are the two global megatrends that are shaping much of the world as we know it. There are other global megatrends, such as technological convergence (where increasingly innovation rises from collaborations between experts in disparate fields of scientific study) but their influence on the financial and insurance services industry is not as significant.
