The Netherlands has quickly established itself as a hub for innovation, especially for FinTech startups. Yearly events such as Money 20/20 and the Cyber & Fintech Summit highlight the amount of cutting-edge technology being introduced into financial services. It is an exciting market, and there is still much room for challengers to find a niche, such as wealth management or mortgages, and claim it.

Dutch banks are already committed to providing their customers with a high level of innovative services. Consequently, there is a great amount of collaboration and support between FinTechs and traditional banks, with a large market share devoted to solutions for digital payments.

Looking to the future, here are a few FinTech trends we expect to advance in the next few years:

• Open banking. Following the EU’s adoption of PSD2, legislators hoped that open banking would allow challenger FinTechs to compete with traditional banks, offering new and better products and services. Adoption within the Dutch market has been slow to start, but is expected to pick up in the future. Inherent to this trend is the close collaboration between traditional banks and Dutch FinTechs, which is necessary for employing open banking.
• Crowdfunding. Looking beyond retail banking, Dutch FinTechs are offering new ways for SMEs to source funding. Crowdfunding has grown rapidly as a FinTech segment and has been legitimised by the Dutch AFM (Autoriteit Financiële Markten), who designated best practices in April 2018.
• Blockchain represents an interesting opportunity within the Dutch FinTech market. The anonymous nature of blockchain transactions has been a major hindrance to adoption. However, this is beginning to change, as evidenced by Dutch bank ABN AMRO partnering with ING and Accenture to create a blockchain trade inventory platform.

All of these segments mark the increasing digitalisation and adoption of cutting-edge technology into banking and financial services.

As exciting as this is, these innovations beget increasing amounts of cyber risk – Dutch FinTechs and financial services must ensure that they take proactive measures to prevent cyber incidents or attacks. Open banking, for example, utilises APIs that can create an easy entrance point for cyberattackers. Both financial institutions and startups have to constantly monitor for these vulnerabilities as they share data and connect their infrastructures. Similar risks are inherent to digital assets traded on blockchain platforms.

In both cases, identifying, analysing and managing these risks are key to maintaining secure operations.

At CyNation, we are committed to applying constant innovation to our solutions, helping financial services organisations and FinTechs within the Dutch and UK market remain secure. With our partner, Compumatica, we are excited to be offering our products for all of your cybersecurity needs.