Collaboration trumps genius

For Hunter, the future of technology in financial services will focus on “collaboration and being kinder and more open to working together”.

“Things are changing so fast... You can't stay in your silos anymore,” he says.

Hervey agreed, and says that while the financial services industry has been through a bit of a rough patch, it has also opened up a rare opportunity to really stop and have a long hard look at what they can do to serve the wider population.

Hunter says the change creates a need for cross-disciplinary teams and far greater levels of diversity. “We talked about artificial intelligence but if you have a bunch of old, white men running the algorithms it's going to give you biased results,” he says. “Collaboration trumps genius.”

For the team at Future Crunch, what really matters is not the technologies themselves, but what people do with them. Hervey, for example, shared a fascinating anecdote about advances to wearable technologies in India, where the Delhi police uploaded a database of all of the city's missing children.

The police then visited all of the cities orphanages in Delhi and in the space of four days they were able to identify 3000 missing children - reuniting some of them with their families for the first time in years.

“That is a story which didn't make it into any of the public media globally but for me it's just as extraordinary as the scarier surveillance stories coming out from other places around the world,” says Hervey.

Watch the video above to hear more.

Carina Parisella is innovation editor at bluenotes.