As the new year begins, it’s a great time to look forward to what 2025 has in store for fintech companies. As the Senior VP of Business Technology, Customer Success at Discover Financial Services, I’m responsible for bringing together the people, processes and technology that support our customers’ successful interactions with Discover technology.
For me, I’m most excited about the fintech trends that I believe will help Discover deliver faster, more secure, resilient technology that benefits our customers.
Here are the 6 trends that I see taking off in 2025.
Convergence of Developer Platforms and SRE Practices
The convergence of developer platforms is transforming how organizations build, deliver, and operate software by unifying key aspects of the development lifecycle. A modern developer platform integrates pipelines that streamline product delivery while embedding learning, collaboration, risk management, and governance directly into the development process. These platforms provide digital environments that support rapid iteration and automation while maintaining control over compliance and security. They also bring operational metrics from production applications into a common observability framework, ensuring that teams can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues efficiently.
By aligning site reliability engineering (SRE) practices with software development, organizations can proactively enhance reliability, reduce toil, and improve overall system performance.
Beyond delivery and operations, developer platforms provide clarity on incidents, problems, and resolutions, helping teams prioritize backlogs with real-time insights. A unified approach ensures that engineering efforts are tied to business outcomes by providing a common view of applications as they support customer processes. This extends to software supply chain security through a comprehensive view of software bill of materials (SBOMs), enabling organizations to manage dependencies and vulnerabilities effectively.
By bringing together development, operations, and security into a cohesive ecosystem, modern developer platforms create an environment where teams can accelerate innovation while maintaining control, resilience, and alignment with business needs.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are transforming the developer experience in production, site reliability engineering (SRE), and operational excellence. AI-driven observability platforms ingest and analyze vast amounts of telemetry data—logs, metrics, and traces—to detect anomalies, predict failures, and automate incident response.
By leveraging ML models, organizations can move beyond reactive monitoring to proactive issue prevention, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR) incidents. These AI-powered insights enable developers and SRE teams to focus on improving system reliability rather than being consumed by manual troubleshooting and firefighting.
Beyond incident management, AI and ML enhance capacity planning, performance optimization, and automation within production environments. Intelligent algorithms can dynamically adjust resources, optimize deployments, and recommend changes based on real-time application behavior. AI-driven root cause analysis accelerates debugging, while natural language processing (NLP)-powered assistants provide contextual recommendations for remediation.
By integrating AI into developer workflows, organizations create self-healing systems, improve operational efficiency, and enable engineering teams to prioritize high-impact work that drives innovation and customer satisfaction.
Cybersecurity and RegTech
With the rise of fraud activity and cyber attacks, cybersecurity remains a top priority. Regulatory Technology (RegTech) solutions are being created and implemented to automate compliance processes, manage risks, and ensure adherence to evolving regulations. The automation of regulatory controls increases oversight of the technology, removes human error, and gives engineers time to focus less on manual compliance tasks and more on innovations.
This focus on security and compliance is essential for maintaining customer trust and safeguarding financial systems.
Cloud Computing and SaaS Solutions
Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are reshaping the financial services industry by providing scalable, secure, and compliant infrastructure that accelerates innovation. Financial institutions leverage the cloud to modernize legacy systems, enabling faster product development and seamless customer experiences.
With cloud-native architectures, banks and financial firms can deploy and iterate services rapidly, ensuring they meet evolving regulatory requirements and customer expectations. SaaS platforms further streamline operations by offering managed solutions for critical functions like fraud detection, risk management, customer relationship management (CRM), and core banking operations, reducing the burden of maintaining on-premises infrastructure.
Beyond agility, cloud computing enhances financial institutions’ resilience and security posture. Advanced security controls, automated compliance frameworks, and AI-driven threat detection help organizations manage risk more effectively while meeting stringent regulatory standards. The scalability of cloud environments allows financial firms to handle high transaction volumes during peak periods without compromising performance.
Additionally, cloud-based analytics and AI solutions enable real-time insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational efficiencies, empowering data-driven decision-making. By embracing cloud and SaaS solutions, financial institutions can enhance customer trust, improve operational efficiency, and drive long-term digital transformation
Dynamic Customer Journeys through Design Thinking and Adaptive UIs
Financial institutions are embracing design thinking and adaptive user interfaces (UIs) to craft dynamic, customer-centric journeys. By leveraging real-time data and customer insights, financial platforms can adapt their interfaces and workflows to meet individual user needs, preferences, and behaviors.
This approach ensures that interactions are intuitive and personalized, enhancing user satisfaction and engagement. Dynamic UIs adjust to various contexts, such as device type, user proficiency, or the complexity of the financial product, while design thinking methodologies prioritize empathy and iterative improvement. Together, these strategies enable institutions to deliver seamless experiences that evolve with their customers, fostering long-term loyalty and trust.
Open Source as a Catalyst for Innovation in Financial Services
Open source is becoming a cornerstone of technological innovation in financial services, fostering collaboration, transparency, and rapid development. By adopting open-source technologies, financial institutions can leverage community-driven advancements to accelerate product development, reduce costs, and avoid vendor lock-in.
Open source enables the creation of shared tools and platforms for critical areas such as payments, security, and analytics. Furthermore, it promotes a culture of innovation where institutions contribute to and benefit from collective knowledge sharing. By integrating open-source solutions, financial services can remain agile, enhance interoperability, and quickly adapt to evolving customer and regulatory demands.
By Angel Diaz