The Promise and Perils of Technology - Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cybercrime and FinTech, Salzburg Global Seminar Conference Report, 07/2018 In the financial landscape, new technologies such as AI and big data provide opportunities for banks to redefine their customer relationships and to create new ways to offer customized problem-solving services and advice to clients. The digital revolution in combination with regulatory initiatives has also lowered the barriers to entry in financial services for new competitors such as fintechs and tech incumbents giving them access to banks’ clients, infrastructure and data. As a consequence, established financial institutions face a new level of multi- faceted competition and the emergence of cross-sectoral ecosystems – with players such as Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon in the US and Alibaba and WeChat in Asia – increasingly entering traditional financial services. This is putting pressure on incumbents’ business models. As the trend toward open banking and APIs opens up banks’ infrastructures to allow data to move seamlessly between systems, new technology-enabled platforms emerge with significantly more open, direct access for consumers and new ways of accessing, analyzing and storing data. Neo-banks, crowd-funding, peer- to-peer platforms, aggregators, and digital wallets have all started to unbundle banking by disaggregating the previously completely bank-internal, bank-controlled supply chain layer by layer and occupying and optimizing individual parts of it, leading to a heightened level of disintermediation. If banks do not adapt their business models in the face of these developments, they are in danger of becoming commodities and could be further reduced to providing basic infrastructure for third parties to use and to communicate through. https://www.salzburgglobal.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Documents/2010- 2019/2018/Session_599/SalzburgGlobal_Report_599.pdf