Reflecting on Two Years at SEBx, Head of Business and Technology, Victor Hjelm, Revisits His Predictions for the Future of Finance.

Head of Business & Technology, Victor Hjelm

Before starting at SEBx two years ago, at the end of 2022, I wrote a case study predicting the future trends of banking and investments. As I look back on it now, it is humbling to realize how challenging it is to predict the future.

At the center of almost all R&D efforts and investments today is of course AI, which I didn’t give nearly enough attention to. In hindsight, I probably should have given the rise of tools like ChatGPT a bit more importance on how they would change the way of working and create more efficiency. But in my defense, it was just launched to the public by the time I wrote the case study. But it works as a good example for how quickly things can move when there is a technological leap.

My next area of predictions had to do with the Metaverse. In contrast to AI, Metaverse has not at all made the same progress during the past two years. I thought we would see a shift towards marketing and branding in a virtual world, and have virtual office presence, product placements, and/or be buying digital real estate in some alternate universe. I was likely overly hyped in my prediction of this because of the name and focus shift from Facebook to Meta a year before my case study. Little did I know when I wrote my predictions at the time, that Meta would announce their shift of focus away from Metaverse to AI just a couple of months later in Feb 2023. Alas, it seems the metaverse is still very much in the “in development” phase if it will happen at all.

Thankfully for me, it was not only vague predictions in my case study, take the investments in alternative assets, for example. I was fairly certain that things like art, music rights, real estate, and private equity would become more accessible as bankable assets. Through securitization and/or tokenization this has become a growing area, especially amongst the Private Banking segment. Fractional ownership has increased in the past two years, making these mostly illiquid assets more accessible to a broader audience. Moreover, investments in digital assets have increased in recent years, and price records for NFTs (non- fungible tokens) have been set during the past two years.

As for quantum computing, we’re still waiting for it to become the game changer I envisioned. While it is certainly on the horizon, we’re not quite there yet. I do believe it will eventually revolutionize areas like portfolio management, derivatives pricing, and cyber security, but for now, it is more of a “monitor the area” scenario.

In the end, you cannot really predict the future, but the important thing for both an organization as well as yourself is to be adaptable, agile, and prepared to adjust when new opportunities or challenges arise. Change will inevitably happen, and basically you only have two alternatives on how to deal with it. You can either be part of the disruption, or you can choose to do nothing and become disrupted. We at SEBx are working every day to be the first to disrupt.