Investors will have to wait and see whether President-elect Donald Trump delivers on campaign promises that range from massive deregulation in the financial sector to trade protectionist actions to make America great again. However certain is that the new administration will emphasize fiscal tools that range from tax cuts to infrastructure spending to stimulate the US economy.

As the year quickly comes to a close, news this week takes a step back to assess the impact of APIs on the financial sector, more emerging insurance trends, and FinTech’s impact on the underbanked and unbanked populations in the U.S. and abroad. We also learned that consumers are waking up to digital banking options, but contrary to the push towards digital everything, people still like cash and plastic cards over mobile wallets. Take a look at these insights and more in this week’s FinTech Rising round-up.

My Four Takeaways from This Week’s FOMC Meeting.

The United States is poised to enter a more typical economic cycle than we’ve seen since the 1990s.  The Trump administration’s outsized tax cuts and plans to increase defense spending, and the virtual certainty that the GOP Congress will eagerly go along, will swell the US budget deficit and jumpstart faster growth. 

Financial technology evolves into its next stage of maturity in 2017. Where venture investments going to FinTech firms marked progress to date, in the coming year regulatory interest will come to the fore.

President-Elect Donald Trump ran his campaign on a promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. His recent appointment of Rep. Tom Price, author of the “Empowering Patients First Act”[1], as HHS secretary indicates that he is serious.[2] Price's proposal is a market-based approach that reduces government spending, narrows the range of care that insurers are mandated to cover, offsets premium increases for older, sicker patients with tax credits, caps the employer-tax exclusion, and reverses Medicaid expansion. 

FinTech's insurance sector came to the fore this week. This Google Trends chart and series of tweets tell the story of InsureTech's growth in 2016.

The results are in. The National Retail Federation (NRF) just released their survey results for post-Thanksgiving shopping. The numbers were strong. 154 million consumers shopped this holiday weekend, up 2% from 2015 and up 15% from 2014.