2016 will see increased investment in mobile and deeper functionality in the Internet of Things, according to two Israel-based financial services experts.

Matan Bar, head of PayPal’s Consumer Product Center in Tel Aviv, noted in the Jerusalem Post several areas he expects to see change in PayPal’s areas of operation in 2016:

• Mobile Payments. Bar described 70% year-over-year growth in peer-to-peer payments for PayPal in 2015 (read: Venmo), and also noted that e-commerce is increasingly shifting to mobile. Indeed, Amazon reported nearly 70% of its 2015 holiday shopping took place on mobile devices.
• Unbundling of services. Millennials are driving this trend, Bar said, because of their demand for a superior user experience. This explains a great deal of the appeal of online loans vs. traditional bank loans, he said.
• More startups competing with banks. Bar predicts more fintech startups appearing in 2016, and also sees these companies competing more directly with the financial services offered by banks. This observations flies in the face of two common assumptions in the U.S. these days — one, that fintech startups will being to consolidate as capital gets scarcer and investors have more outlets for returns with rising interest rates; and two, that startups are looking to cooperate rather than compete with FIs.
• A growing role for blockchains and distributed ledgers. Enough said.

Orna Kleinman, manager of SAP Labs Israel, meanwhile, offered a few of her predictions of her own:

• Internet of Me. Communications between consumers and corporations will continue to get more personalized.
• Internet of Things. The connections between devices will continue, and this will yield useful data to corporations. Constantly connected consumers will have yet more potential touch points with financial services providers.
• Intelligent Enterprise. Companies are looking to become more efficient and spend less on the software that simply runs operations. In 2016, Kleinman says, there will be increased attention on digital transformation beyond just the core of the business. This means IT spend shifting to the cloud, “even in the fintech industry of industries that we call traditional,” she said. It also means increased attention to the user experience, Kleinman said, echoing Bar. You can’t write software for millennials, she said, without having millennials on your team.

Ran Senderovitz, vice president in the client computing group at Intel, noted that biometric authentication would gain traction in 2016. He also saw a rise in connected devices and the growth of cloud computing across enterprises.