The world of consumer tech and digital transformation tells a story of aggressive innovation and shifting market trends. Over the course of the 21st century to date, several long-lived legacy industries have found themselves displaced or wholly supplanted by new, lightweight and more accessible sectors.
This process is always ongoing. The present moment, for example, can be seen as a reckoning by a number of different sectors with the implications of generative AI. However, for now, its integration or ostensible threat to the prominence of existing industries is in its earliest stages.
We do, however, have several key examples of sectors that have, over the past decade, come to assume a newly dominant position in tech markets. Here we’ll be taking a look at the three fastest growing and most impactful of these as of 2024.
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Fintech
Prior to the financial crash of the late 00s, the overwhelming majority of people around the world banked and conducted their financial lives through traditional banks with registered brick-and-mortar branches.
While today, traditional banking still holds an important position in our economy, on the consumer end of finance the emergence of Fintech services has proven immensely successful. By positioning themselves as a more democratic and direct alternative to the banks widely considered to be behind the recession, Fintech platforms – from eWallets to exchanges and neo-banks – rode the wave of smartphone adoption to provide a wholly new financial solution for the 21st century.
In 2024, over 60% of all people now use one or more Fintech products, with that number rising as high as 90% in specific markets like the People’s Republic of China. Having access to payments, or even one’s entire bank service, available right from their phone is a meaningful step change in accessibility over what came before it.
Combine this with the integrated budgeting and finance tools commonplace on Fintech platforms, and the rise of integrated crypto-wallets, and it’s easy to see why this sector has proven so successful at displacing traditional banking in a world increasingly moving towards cashless transactions.
Gaming
While gaming has been around for decades, it would not be until 2004 that its average yearly revenue would come to surpass the likes of the film and music industries. What’s more, whereas those legacy media sectors have enjoyed a relatively consistent market size ever since, gaming has only continued to grow.
The reasons behind this are diverse. Partly, this is due to a generation of professionals raised on games now increasingly using their disposable income on gaming products. Likewise, the rise of the smartphone has seen whole new demographics of gamers join the digital market. For example, certain titles traditionally associated with brick-and-mortar gaming providers, such as the table title roulette, have found a new life among a new cohort of tech-savvy gamers accessing digital variants of this title through reputable platforms like PokerStars Casino which comes fully optimized for the smartphone format.
Another key component to the rise of gaming as the world’s new favorite entertainment product is the emergence of unique monetization models within the industry. Known as microtransactions, these refer to the sale of in-game items that generate continuous revenue from players from a single game. It is for this reason that the sector is able to continue growing, even when not adding new players to its consumer-base.
At present the industry generates over $300 billion a year – five times that of the film industry, and it shows no sign of slowing any time soon. This is especially true as the market increasingly pivots towards live-service games and esports, which in addition to microtransactions, typically require season-pass subscriptions.
E-Commerce
Digital shopping has been a feature of the internet since its earliest days, though it would take a while for it to come to represent a significant part of global retail. By 1999, global eCommerce sales totaled around $150 billion. By 2003, it accounted for $500 billion – and then $1 trillion by 2007.
Today, global eCommerce accounts for almost $8 trillion, with over a quarter of all sales across all formats now taking place through online platforms. It is significant to note that while the numbers were always trending steadily in this direction, it wouldn’t be until the supply chain disruptions of the early 2020s that eCommerce would grow substantively. Since 2019, eCommerce sales grew by 120% – a sharp increase over its previous growth trend that saw it take over 8 years to grow by a similar extent pre-2019.
Even without this boost in growth, few were banking against the rise of eCommerce. That’s because digital retail is a no-brainer. On-demand access to competitive prices and a global marketplace, all backed by increasingly efficient transport and logistics meant that the high street had little chance of meaningfully competing with it.
