Think about the latest trends in innovation and what does your mind imagine? Maybe you think about the connected home, such as a door that either greets you by name based on your height and cadence of your step or recognizes and stops a two-year-old from wandering out of the house unattended. Maybe you imagine appliances that can order and purchase goods, such as the dishwasher that orders more detergent when the bottle is low. Perhaps you imagine something we often hear about in the news: a car that can map a route and deliver its passengers without a driver. Maybe none of these come to mind because they sound far-fetched. In financial services, we think about innovation as it intersects with money and management of it. Already, we are providing payment-card applications to our fleet customers that help them find the closest filling station with the best price at the pump. We are helping private jet pilots arrange and pay for their aeronautical service and more via a simple-to-use mobile app — and eliminating paper invoices and receipts in the process. What comes next is only happening sooner and sooner. The pace of innovation has gone from years to months to sometimes weeks as new ideas surface and users have the drive to make it possible. An interesting area that is beginning to show promise can be found in the Internet of Things — things connected by networks to computers and/or each other via the internet. These sensors are creating a revolution as they connect the globe in a digital nervous system that has the potential to create an ecosystem with trillion-dollar impacts. Some predict there will be 10 devices for every human on earth by 2020, and it’s unlikely to stop there. Imagine the art of the […]
