Post Covid-19: A Game Changer for Financial Technology
What role can technology play in achieving sustainable growth and diversification? How can it be used in a socially responsible way to navigate businesses in the current crisis and to drive businesses in this new reality? Are we really on the verge of a new digital and technology-driven world?
Companies have long touted the importance of technology in driving modern business; technology as a differentiator, technology to drive growth and revenue and to optimise cost. But how much is propaganda and how much is reality?
Six months ago, investment focused on big data, data mining and artificial intelligence. All driven by growth targets. This was before COVID-19; before the ‘new reality’.
Business is now looking to technology for survival, for damage control and for maintaining contact with customers, clients and the outside world. The global lockdown has provided us with an opportunity for reflection. But can we learn and leverage this opportunity? Can we make real all that we have envisioned and opined upon for so long?
Following independence from the Former Soviet Union, Kazakhstan focused its economic development strategy on extracting and exporting natural resources. The country benefited from rapid economic growth and urbanization and, according to the World Bank, Kazakhstan is now considered an upper-middle income economy. But in recent years, a key economic strategy of the country has been the diversification away from a reliance on its natural resources, and the focus has moved toward sustainable growth and a strategy of technological and digital innovation.
The current global health crisis provides all of us with a preview of what a full-fledged climate crisis could entail, in terms of simultaneous exogenous shocks to supply and demand, disruption of supply chains, and global transmission and amplification mechanisms.