Tuesday, September 17, 2013
And there goes the third day of Sibos.
In terms of our on-site events, today was the day of our second debate: All About T-Bonds, opening the discussions about the auction system of state treasuries. We proposed a standardized solution architected over SwiftNet and wanted to know if this solution is of interest for all markets or only the ones less evolved which are still based on manual work or unstandardized communication.
There were some interesting ideas shared and we were happy to have representatives from the Dutch State Treasury Agency – Ministy of Finance among the participants, facilitating practice exchange between the Dutch institution and the Romanian State Treasury representative present at the session.
In terms of on-sibos events, one of the main attractions today was, of course, the Innotribe Startup Challenge 2013 Grand Finale. As you probably know, the Innotribe Startup Challenge 2013 introduces the world’s most promising FinTech and Financial Service startups to the global community of financial institutions, venture capitalists, angels and influencers actively investing in innovation. The nine winning startups and six innovators, selected from hundreds of interested candidates, have competed in front of the live audience and professional panel of judges for a cash prize of 50,000 USD.
And the winners were KlickEx for startups and Waratek for innovators.
Another interesting session was a workshop on the future of Sibos. Powered by Innotribe, the Sibos 2020 prototype was an exclusive workshop where young leaders addressed questions like: What will Sibos look like in 2020? Will it be completely virtual or will face-to-face networking still be of key importance? Will Sibos still last 4 days or will it become a 10 day festival? And how about social media? And the closing party?
The workshop was designed as a co-creation exercise, the intended output being conference “proto-types” based on participants’ ideas and vision. So we were playing the part of SWIFT in shaping Sibos 2020. Good strategy to get fresh ideas on how to adapt Sibos according to attendees input and needs.
It was interesting to see how important the experience from the personal point of view is to participants. The end-of-Sibos day parties were on each team’s designing space in the networking and human experience sections of the prototype. Guess you can never underestimate the need for fun and a bit of relaxing time after such full work days.
Among the suggestions for Sibos 2020 I can mention leveraging technology more and having a Sibos for Dummies to help first time attendees get around the conference. When we were talking price, especially booth price, I proposed having a Sibos stand section for start-ups: small companies with innovative ideas bringing a spark to the whole set-up. And if they can’t afford the participation, maybe big corporates could sponsor them as supporters of good new ideas in the industry.
To end the day in a giving manner, after the T-Bonds open debate we had our traditional lucky draw. The lucky winners have received a special edition collection of historic Romanian coins.
I’ll come back tomorrow with updates from the last day at Sibos. Stay tuned.
By Alexandru Vinogradov, 17 September 2013.