data from 5G-enabled devices are likely to have a significant positive impact on the quality and speed of policy and credit approvals, providing accurate, verifiable data on everything from vehicle usage to agricultural, factory or mining outputs. Telemetry is already well-established in the vehicle insurance sector and is certain to expand. With access to IoT data streams and the infrastructure to subject all this real-time information to advanced analytics, insurers will be able to offer policies that are far more closely tailored and much more flexible. This will extend to everything from consumer and health insurance to the underwriting of major extractive industry projects. IoT in trade finance In trade finance, data from sensors in ports, ships, and from containers and vehicles gives banks and insurers a new level of endto-end transparency about the transactions, carriers and cargoes they are asked to fund and underwrite. This will reduce costly delays and fraud whilst increasing insight into the efficiency of individual operators. All organisations engaged in trade will improve access to working capital. And the use of IoT technology increases the likelihood of small and medium-sized businesses obtaining trade finance and credit, based on rapid analysis of typical industry risk indicators. Fund management, the markets and IoT The direct use cases of the IoT are harder to foresee in fund management, investment banking and capital markets and are often confused with analytics and AI. There is, however, no doubt that companies operating in these intensely competitive arenas will have to accommodate themselves to the new volumes of data the IoT will generate from different industrial and commercial sectors. If they fail to build the capacity to analyse aggregated and refined IoT data, they will lose out significantly to financial institutions that have the infrastructure and the solutions in place. Professional services For the professional services sector, access to streaming data and its analytics will enable firms to offer services and outsourcing on a near-real-time basis, eliminating unnecessary hours and increasing efficiency. In accountancy and financial management, the nature of auditing and consultancy is likely to change in industries such as discrete manufacturing, where sensor data will transform how organisations operate. Auditing in many sectors may well become a more continuous process, adapting to the constant flow of data. The necessary IoT infrastructure – edge computing IoT growth depends, however, on the expansion of edge infrastructure because it requires a platform with compute, low latency network connectivity and public cloud access. Without this, most use cases will struggle to get off the ground. In the UK, thankfully, the country’s edge infrastructure is advancing fast, bringing IoT technologies and services within reach of almost every business in the country. Edge computing is vital because the IoT requires gateway hubs to process masses of data from sensors and devices. Because public cloud-based applications that orchestrate the IoT do not require all the data devices generate, IoT gateways are best-suit- “On a more mundane level, finance departments will find recordkeeping and reporting to become far more automated and efficient.” F i nanc i a l Innov a t i on & F i nTech 46 Finance Monthly.
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