In a new report, Franklin Templeton outlines five “megatrends” that are transforming modern society, including decentralization.

In recent years, Franklin Templeton, a financial giant with about $1.5 trillion in assets under management, has experimented with blockchain technology. The company has made firmer moves into the space in recent years, and announced last September plans to offer digital asset strategies to wealth managers.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Sandy Kaul, head of Franklin Templeton’s digital asset and industry advisory services, said, “This set of technology innovations and the change they have been driving in society has led to this Web3 moment and the development of this crystal crypto ecosystem.” This is why we laid out the megatrends, and we believe they should be highlighted.

Megatrends driven by technology

Those shifts have increased the impact of an individual’s voice on a company’s strategy on the consumer side, according to the report. In addition to improving customers’ experiences, data analytics and business intelligence have shifted from real-time insights to predicting future behaviors, enhancing customers’ experiences.

Furthermore, digital asset platforms have enabled individuals to gain more power through the availability of asset classes and complex financial products that institutional investors use. This is most evident in tokenized assets (both fully digital and digital versions of real-world assets), as well as in decentralized finance (DeFi), which offers advanced trading techniques such as derivatives and staking.