Here's What Are Becoming Financial Trends So Far This Year In 2022

• Author: Monica Jackson
• Posted: 2024-05-02

While financial trends are often novel, there are some trends that remain the same. Overall, the shift to digital currency has remained relatively certain in 2022. Here are some of the leading trends in finance for this year that have been observed so far.

1. Money Is Going Digital

Many economists believed that cryptocurrency volatility would weaken the blockchain. The blockchain is the long-lasting log of cryptocurrency transactions, essentially. Once the COVID-related volatility of stocks and cryptocurrency died down, cryptocurrency's worth largely has stayed down.

One major event that downshifted many forms of cryptocurrency is China's banning of "mining" for it. Mining refers to when people set up Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and run electricity to perform "work" until it nets digital coins. China was a huge part of the blockchain. Now that this activity is banned in the large country, cryptocurrency has slowly begun to recover.

Interestingly, when China banned this, the country's facial recognition technologies began to be able to enable personal transactions at stores. Customers would need to smile at a camera to debit their bank accounts. This would violate many privacy laws in the US, so it's unlikely to be implemented. Though it would be lawful within the European Union, there would likely be political backlash if this were to be implemented in member countries.

2. The Quick Disappearance of Physical Currency

If you've gone shopping within the past year or so, you've likely seen signs saying that you should try to make exact change where possible. This is because during COVID, so many transactions went digital. This led to stores reopening not having enough change to meet consumer demand.

Additionally, many customers have found COVID-era services to be quite useful. These include incentives and programs designed to push customers to place orders and then either have them delivered or prepared to be picked up. Of course, these services require digital transactions.

Seeing as these stores invested a fair chunk of change in the creation and implementation of these systems, they are still in effect. While it's very convenient, it has posed a problem at cash registers around the country and the world.

Many privacy advocacy groups have pointed out that personal data often is now intermixed with finances. This is usually accomplished via data mining. Data mining happens when entities like stores have mountains of consumer data, then shift and sort through it. These are usually mixed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that picks and chooses what a customer is likely to order.

Overall, a "new world" for finance emerged through COVID-19. There are many fascinating and sometimes frightening innovations that will forever change how commerce is performed. Keep in mind that more than 600 currencies around the world have been superseded in the past three decades already. This is a trend that is almost inevitable to prevent from continuing to occur.

3. Digital Wallets Have Come Out of the Woodwork

Many digital wallet services from well-known providers have also entered the scene. Borrowing money or using it in a transaction used to be simply handing over a certain amount of cash that you use to either purchase or gift it to someone or a business you have agreed to transact with. These wallets used to initially only take debit cards. They now are almost universally able to accept credit cards as well as raw bank details.

Unfortunately, the boom in demand for these services left some with open fiscal data mishandling. Companies who used to solely take small transactions from small businesses found themselves as suddenly the leaders in the borrowing and spending world. While it may be a data science and personal consumer data nightmare, it has sped up how quickly transactions can be processed.

The way these services make money is by taking a fee out of each type of payment method. Though you may not even see a fee for debit transactions, the services can still make money via data mining. Though these technologies are typically safe to use for both business and personal purposes, you should always stay apprised of data breaches.

Wrapping Up

In short, cryptocurrency and regular currencies have been heavily manipulated by the COVID-19 world. Learning how to utilize these digital consumer finance technologies for the better is key. There's no such thing as "completely safe" when it comes to computers, but you can get close.