The COVID-19 crisis was unprecedented, and has totally reshuffled the deck.

At the LHoFT, we witnessed how the finance industry moved from coping mechanisms to new strategies to address the pandemic and the longer-term implications on society, the new norm.

Looking ahead at 2022, we are certainly marching towards a world that is more digital, decentralised, and (hopefully) sustainable.

Recovery part 1: Digitalisation

Technology providers play a key role in driving digitalisation to enhance operations and customer experience in the financial industry. For instance, the solutions can offer lasting gains in efficiency and improve customer experience.

From a front-end perspective, the customer must remain the centre, with a keen focus on their behaviour, needs and expectations, shaped by the increasingly digital environment around them.

As LHoFT CEO, Nasir Zubairi, explains: “Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to buy a loan, a mortgage or an investment product. You wake up wanting to buy a car, a house, or worried about being able to buy things when you retire. People want to do transactions today and tomorrow. Financial services are there to enable that, yet we often spend more time on the ‘service’ than the transaction.”

Recovery part 2: Decentralisation

As the lockdown drove broader interest in personal finance, the WealthTech industry was encouraged to lower the barriers for active wealth management. The economic turmoil and the shift in institutional trust highlighted cryptocurrencies as a viable wealth preservation channel, as detailed in our recent report “”

As Jean-Louis Schiltz and Nadia Manzari of Schiltz & Schiltz SA stated in the paper : “With distributed ledger technologies and cryptocurrencies here to stay, since 2014 Luxembourg has shown its capacity to innovate in the sphere of Fintech. We firmly believe that Luxembourg will also become an EU hub for regulated token offerings in the future.”

Dive deeper into this topic with LHoFT CEO , on a range of topics including decentralised finance.

Recovery part 3: Sustainability and Inclusion

Luxembourg’s finance community is undoubtedly aligned with the idea that collaboration goes alongside successful business. Impact initiatives have been launched in partnership with actors across the ecosystem to support the domestic industry and the international community.

Sustainability and inclusion are not contradictory to profit and growth, as was , LHoFT Member, at the ICT Spring Fintech Summit where he explained the potential to be found in underserved markets.

Luxembourg’s finance industry is robust largely because of its community, and community and collaboration have helped the industry transition rapidly from resilience to full recovery.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the , where companies will share their experiences on how they have successfully reoriented, reinvented, recovered, and shown solidarity during this global health crisis.