September 2013

Monday, September 30, 2013

Here’s a summary of our experience as exhibitors at Sibos Dubai.

We had a brilliant week and we’d first of all like to thank our guests, whom we’ve had very interesting conversations with.

Then, we would like to thank all those who have augmented our online presence. I’ll start with Mr Chris Skinner, who has dedicated an entire blog post to our Financial Tribes of the Future session. “The day starts with […] the first session of the day: Financial tribes of the future, a topic that is close to my heart and explored the idea that banking will no longer be a mass market of service in the future, but a collation of many tribes of individuals with financial needs.”. He also included a picture from this session in his Remembering #Sibos 2013 in pictures post.

Then, Matteo Rizzi who has agreed to be part of this sessions’ panel and who wrote on his blog: “I was on a very interesting panel, unsuspectedly VERY popular, talking about collaboration and information sharing (and connected companies, and disruption from startups, etc etc). Allevo did a great job in putting this together. My first panel in my new role. ”

I was interviewed by Remi Akinjomo from the Technology Banker and my opinion was included in their Sibos wrapup post. Ioana Guiman, Product Manager at Allevo also agrees: “The financial African market is in full swing, it allows creating new types of solutions that are specifically designed to improve the lives of people. It is not about making investors rich, it is about creating something with meaning, something that matters.”

We’ve had 11 posts on our blog dedicated to this participation at Sibos.

We’ve sent 208 tweets from Sibos.

Last, but not least, for four days in a row, we’ve had one meeting after the other, the outcome of which you’ll see very shortly, we trust, in terms of new partnerships and new customers.

An extraordinary experience. We thank everyone who was part of it and we’re looking forward to a Sibos at least as rewarding as this one next fall in Boston!

By Ioana Guiman, 30 September 2013.

Only a few days after her return from Sibos, Corina Mihalache has been invited as a keynote speaker at a conference organized by Oxygen Events on the Security risks in cyber space.

Below is her presentation:

Friday, September 27, 2013

Last week at the same time we were still in Dubai packing after this year’s edition of Sibos. I kind of wondered why in Dubai? Especially in September. Part of the answer came from Chirag Shah, chief strategy and business development officer for Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC): “Within a four-hour flight radius of Dubai, you have one third of humanity, USD 6 trillion in GDP and access to the emerging markets of South Asia and the Middle East.” Moreover, Dubai is considered now an essential gateway to the Africa-Asia trade route, a hub for all sorts of trade and financial flows. And maybe it is also considered some kind of model, for its engagement with the global economy via business, tourism and consumerism. An example of the Islamic capitalism rise.

But coming back to older manifestations of capitalism, this edition marked 35 years since the first Sibos. SWIFT CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt said: “This year’s Sibos has taught us that the world has fundamentally changed, and what this means for banks, for SWIFT and Sibos will provide food for thought in 2014.”

So, what has this Sibos taught us?

That technology is not the only issue posing new challenges in the future to the banking industry? Specialists say that technology developments and effectively using new technology are not the only aspects changing the face of banking and that developments in the political world have become more influential than ever. Well, that is definitely not unexpected.

That cyber-security is the main fuss now? SWIFT announced it during the opening plenary as the next step. But Sibos Issues says that while delegates were enthusiastic about the central role of technology in today’s banking industry, as many were also worried about creating a system that is safe and secure.

That regulation overload could pose a death threat to correspondent banking and that compliance related costs can prove prohibitive for small banks? On Thursday’s compliance forum discussion on “Global regulation, regional perspectives” 55% of audience members polled strongly agreed that it was more challenging for smaller players in the market to keep up with continuously evolving regulations due to resource constraints. Also, 62% of audience members polled said they had to turn away a small amount of business because of regulation, 32% saying they had turned away a lot.

That mobile payments’ role is not so clear yet to the industry? Opinion is divided between those who see an opportunity for banks to reach the 2.5 billion people who still have no bank account and those who believe it is eroding the role of banks, creating challenges related to customer interaction.

That “Banks need to have a well thought through innovation agenda” as Rajesh Mehta, regional head of treasury and trade solutions, EMEA, Citi said? With a half decade spent recovering from the financial crisis, banks now face new challenges related to regulators constantly raising the bar and new technology developments disrupting the traditional banking models.

Well, we’ve been preaching this last year at Sibos Osaka, when we said that change has become mandatory, as competition is fierce and more agile players are emerging, capturing niche markets and posing a threat on more traditional lines of business. The challenges the financial industry is facing are, in the words of Brett King, that “the bank of today is gone tomorrow; banking is no longer a place you go, it becomes something you do”. Thus new players are changing the consumer experience. We said that when announcing Allevo’s strategy to drastically change its business model, stepping away from the traditional habits of owning and controlling and turning to open & freely distributed solutions. A big cultural leap ahead and a complete change in values which affects us, as well as our customers, the banks and the financial institutions. This is all about sharing and creating a collaborative environment where ideas are born & nurtured. That leaves differentiation on services & product offer towards the end-customers rather than technical features & IT systems.

We said back then and we still believe that banks need to change their mind-set as well and start sharing their issues and trying to solve them together. This is not only about evolving on the technology scale, this is also about the way we can address rapidly changing end users requirements today and tomorrow.

Differentiation through services and enhanced customer experience is what in fact matters. Back offices are neither sexy, nor visible to customers. This is why collaboration at plumbing level allows reallocating resources, both financial and human, to creating services perceived of value by customers. So, if back-offices are not a customer honey-pot, then what would happen if these were actually the same? What if there would be a tool that would allow creating a certain level of standardization in the IT layer of financial institutions? We believe open solutions are fit for this particular setting. And that’s why we are so involved in our FinTP project, developing the first open source platform for financial transactions processing and building a community around it.

What else have we learned at Sibos? That we should think more about financial inclusion and that banking cannot be global while half the world’s population remains unbanked?

Modesty aside, we already addressed this topic at Sibos Osaka in our community session Agile Financial Inclusion. So we raised the issue of “banking the unbanked” even before the topic got hot at Sibos this year. We believe that cost for service is a true barrier to get into this area and it therefore needs to run on a different business model than a traditional “brick and mortar bank” within walking distance. This is where banks need to become creative in inventing new distribution channels. Easiest to think of is existing networks, such as gas stations, supermarkets, retail stores, mobile operators and so on.

And we also addressed the matter this year, in the Innotribe tunnel, talking about Gen Z Banking for People. What prevents people from being truly financially included is that the existing technology that can help solve the problem is not widely adopted. It already exists in the hands on Generation Z, but it is not used by banks and financial institutions to serve the best interest of the people. We even proposed a solution: a multi-component tool that can help banks make people send and receive virtual money from one to the other at a much lower cost than that of money transfer operators. The first is a tool that can centrally process all financial transactions, whereas the other two are used to connect all distribution points to achieve one consolidated flow. The front office component is an application that can be operated by representatives of MMTs, agents of the bank (gas stations, post offices, etc), other banks or branches of the same bank, ATMs. The payments initiated by all front offices are centrally collected and processed in the headquarters of the bank by the central back-office component.

We are aware that leveraging mobile technology will be vital to extending financial inclusion to the world’s poor and underprivileged. And the potential is to introduce as many as 2.5 billion ‘unbanked’ people to financial services. As Rodger Voorhies, director of financial services for the poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said, “Payments are the connective tissue that can help onboard the world’s poor into other financial services. Banks looking to extend their reach into emerging markets should be looking to leverage existing technology infrastructure to drive down costs and increase access. Tapping into mobile phone technology, which has become ubiquitous across the developed and developing world in the past decade, should form the backbone of any strategy to extend financial services to the unbanked. The technology is already there and it is advanced, mobile technology offers many possibilities through smartphone apps and eWallet services to bring payments services to people in remote communities who have never had a bank account before.”

Voorhies also mentioned M-pesa as enabling cost-effective and easy access for deposits, bill payments and sending money. Allevo empowers the systems that allow the microfinance institution Musoni to give loans in Kenya via M-PESA and in Uganda via MTN.

What we can definitely learn is that financial services play a major role in bringing people out of poverty, by providing opportunities and buffering people against risks that can change lives for the better.

This reminds me of an Innotribe session at Sibos last year that really went to my heart: “The Future of Doing Good” and the paradox the prof. Yunus brought out, that of the “banks landing money to those who already have money, instead of those who really need it”.

Food for thought? Finding ways to “enforce” social responsibility into the banking industry might be a start. Because social business is not about charity, but about expanding business models in order to actually solve social problems. About a more human centered banking approach. About making banks and their services people worthy. And we, at Allevo, are willing and trying to take this path, by offering solutions for banks to be more for the people.

Food for thought no. 2? Maybe at Sibos next year organizers will have a big session on Financial Tribes of the Future :).

By Ioana Moldovan, 27 September 2013.

Monday, on September 23rd, the closing event of the ROSEdu Summer of Code program took place. For those of you unfamiliar with it, ROSEdu Summer of Code is a frame project aiming to offer students an alternative summer internship program. Throughout the summer, participants contributed to one of the proposed Open Source projects, while being guided along the way by members of the project’s community.

Why am I writing about it? Well, not only because it is about open source or about young people, but also because Allevo is dedicated to supporting young students bring their fresh and bright ideas to life. That’s why we did not think twice when it came to sponsoring this year’s Summer of Code. Even more, we involved students in our project FinTP, aimed to re-engineer the closed source product qPI into an open source application.

Coming back to Monday evening, the ten participants to the program showcased their final presentations and six scholarships have been granted. One of the winners was Anda Nenu working on Allevo’s project FinTP. Apart from Anda, we had other two students really interested in the experience offered by working on such a complex project as FinTP.

At the end of the summer and of three months of intense work, the students involved in our project managed to develop a tool for generating components configuration files and heavily contributed to developing the FinTP REST API (user interface API).

Congratulations are due to all participants and to the winners. If you want to take a look at same pictures from the event, here’s the album posted by ROSEdu.

1. SIBOS PUBLICATIONS

Sibos Issues – Preview Edition (you can find us on page 8)

Sibos Issues – Tuesday Edition (you can finds us on page 16)

Sibos Issues – Wrap-up Edition (check our invite on page 9)

ALLEVO PRESS RELEASES

Press Release: FINkers United Opens Its Gates to Early Adopters

Press Release: Allevo’s FinTP in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Enterprise Growth Programme

Press Release: Allevo Helps Smith&Smith Be the First Money Transfer Operator in Romania Connected to SWIFT

ALLEVO & MICROSOFT JOINT PRESS RELEASES

Press Release: Pharmaceutical Group A&D Pharma Goes Live with Allevo qPI-TIPc

Press Release: Allevo Extends Payments Management Functionalities In Carrefour Group Romania

Last year I ended my day four of Sibos post with “bye-bye Osaka, Dubai get ready for us.” Well, I don’t know if Dubai was ready for us, but for sure we were ready for Dubai.

Looking back on the past four days, I can say with no doubt that Dubai was the best Sibos in Allevo’s history. On top of the numerous scheduled face-to-face meetings and a significant number of new visitors, our community session Financial Tribes of the Future was a big success. With Community Room 3 filled, at the end, the Q&A session spread for so long that they had to kick us out, as they had no time left to prepare for the next session.

And we were also happy to have Chris Skinner writing an entire article about our session on his blog.

We also had the chance to participate to some very interesting sessions, gather important information, adding up to our present knowledge and experience.

And not an unimportant thing at all, we consolidated our team, cause all we did at Sibos was team work.

And because we had such a great Sibos, we decided to send our CEO, Sorin, a postcard from Dubai.

Speaking of postcards, the ones we prepared for the event were really appreciated. People stopped, smiled and got their copied to send to colleagues.

After all the back-and-forth, the hustle and the agitation from the previous days, coming close to the end makes you feel a little nostalgic, even with all the tiredness and sour feet. The atmosphere of such a big event makes you look forward to the next year… and the next… and the next.

And the next year, we shall see each other in Boston. Until then, bye-bye everyone, we’ll send you a postcard!

By: Alexandru Vinogradov

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Chris Skinner wrote on his blog about our Financial Tribes of the Future Session at Sibos this morning. Here is his post:

“The future bank will be the one with biggest (inter)network

A nice evening at the Address Downtown hotel next to the Dubai Mall’s dancing fountains and then it was morning again.

The day starts with a coffee injection with the best tradeshow barista in the world Franco Russo (I blogged about him last year) and then into the first session of the day: Financial tribes of the future, a topic that is close to my heart.

The discussion was based on a slightly Romanian panel:

Mircea Mihaescu, Director IT Strategy and Technology Innovation, Sberbank
Radu Gratian Ghetea, President, CEC Bank
Matteo Rizzi, Partner, SBT Venture Capital
Rodica Tuchila, Director, Romanian Banking Association
Corina Mihalache, Director, Allevo

and explored the idea that banking will no longer be a mass market of service in the future, but a collation of many tribes of individuals with financial needs.

The theme of tribes recognises that people are members of many tribes. They are not homogenous segments, but multi-coloured diverse groups connected globally through the internet.

The conversation began with some of the more mature members of the panel reminiscing that, when they were growing up, the idea of using a phone as a computer was science fiction. The phone was a landline stuck in the office. Today, the phone as a computer is a fact.

Now we see the same happening with discussions about augmented computing and location and proximity based financial servicing. This will soon be fact. Others are trying to use this opportunity to steal business from us, and we need to focus upon how to maximise our opportunities which is why we’re investing in future technology today.

That is why we will see all aspects of banking changing, from retail to corporate to investment services.

Trade finance and the supply chains change thanks to mobile connectivity, as you can now electronically track everything from inception to conclusion, end-to-end, without any physical documentation. This will make things far more effective and efficient, and our customers will move to what is most efficient and effective. Take PayPal as an example.

Now when we look at payments and banking, the future is already here … it’s just not widely deployed yet.

We can see that from all the technology around today that will allow instant payments without even using a card or cash, but most merchants and retailers are not ready for this so they still need cards and cash.

Give it ten years and the payment will have moved into the background. You won’t see the payment.

This means that the future of payments is not in the processing of payments, but in the information about money movements. Analysing the data about money will help us understand our customers better and help our customers understand their finances better. That will be the real competitive battleground and to compete in this battleground will require collaboration.

Banks are very poor at collaboration – apart from creating their cooperative SWIFT – and many areas of banking today will not exist in the future without collaboration. We need to make collaboration work to survive. If you look at how the world works today, everything has ‘crowd’ in it somewhere with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding being two that really apply to the banking world. This is why we will need far more collaboration in the future as you cannot work or stand alone in a globally connected world.

Banks are therefore connected companies, not entities in their own right, and it will be the most networked banks, the most connected, that win in the future. This underlines the importance of APIs and getting the reach to gain critical mass.

I like this idea as I recently wrote about PayPal and Google investing $1.5 billion in mobile payments since 2009. PayPal now processes around $20 billion in mobile payments, up from $14 billion last year and just $200 million five years ago. But then you have to remember that PayPal and others run their payment services on the infrastructure of banks.

For example, Citibank’s Transaction Services processed $15 billion in mobile payments this year, up from nothing two years ago. That drive is coming from all the players who sit on top of Citibank. The same with Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, Deutsche and others.

So it may not be the bank processing that is visible in this space but the bank behind the brand. That’s the connected bank model and we will see that model widen more and more over the next decade as banks become deconstituted into components.

In other words, the networked bank will be the bank that offers the most functional components for reconstitution into new supply chains and processing structures.

Meanwhile, we all believe the governments will protect us through regulation, but who are they protecting? The banks or the citizens?

We have seen this systemic failure of the banking industry and the fact that everything cannot be protected, and we are now seeing emerging areas of unregulated activity, such as Bitcoin. Bitcoin is using the internet to work around the frictions of global commerce in a connected world. That is hard to manage and, in fact, governments cannot regulate this effectively. So will regulation protect citizens in the future? No. Not from financial crashes or from new and unregulated infrastructures that work better for them.

So the future is going to be one where tribes of consumers and corporates connect to providers of services where the money movement is integrated and in the background. Banks will need to then consider where they fit into this space and morph to new models of banking and finance.

This fits well with yesterday’s innotribe discussion (see Sibos entry #3) and shows that the future is the bank with the most connectivity in the global mobile internet network.

Enough said … I’m going back for another HSBC coffee and a wander around the exhibit hall.”

This post was originally posted on Chris Skinner’s blog.

By Alexandru Vinogradov, 17 September 2013.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

If you had the time to read my Financial Tribes of the Future dedicated post, you know we started the second day at Sibos very well. I am talking about our Financial Tribes of the Future session in Community Room 3 rocking at Sibos. This year, we have invited Mr. Radu Ghetea – President & CEO of CEC Bank, Mr. Mircea Mihaescu – Director of the Sberbank Technology Research Center in Moscow, Mr. Matteo Rizzi – Partner SBT Venture Capital, to help our own Corina Mihalache – Director Business Analysis – with answers to the questions Ms. Rodica Tuchila, Director at the Romanian Banking Association, our moderator, was asking. What’s the impact of technological evolution on financial infrastructures? How will the demand-supply chain take shape and how will trade be financed? How do you assess the future of payments intermediated by banks or financial institutions? What do you believe will be the cooperation respectively the competition space? How do you perceive knowledge and assets sharing? Will people gather in tribes or rather more evolved and regulated packs?

But you can read all about it the dedicated post. Even more, you can read a full article about it written by Chriss Skinner on his blog.

“So the future is going to be one where tribes of consumers and corporates connect to providers of services where the money movement is integrated and in the background. Banks will need to then consider where they fit into this space and morph to new models of banking and finance.” Chris concluded.

Financial Tribes of The Future

Later on, to continue the discussions from the morning session, our stand B97 hosted the first of our open debates: Building an Open Financial Community, as part of our new approach to bring ideas closer to you, in a friendlier environment.

We talked about the challenges of building an open community around our financial transactions platform FinTP, of attracting communards with different professional profiles, from business expertise, IT architects and designers, programmers, implementers, support, writers, teachers, communicators, marketing and sales and all unintentionally skipped here. People like us, who can forget the tight regulation of in-house practiced processes, and open their mind and deliverables to a network, because by sharing knowledge we are going to receive more knowledge.

We also announced and invited people to the second edition of our FinTP Hackathon that we planned for this end of October.

Please also visit www.fintp.org for more information and join the conversation forum there if you come up with new ideas.

Second day at Sibos ended, we head off now to dinner with the entire Romanian delegation present in Dubai.

But don’t forget, tomorrow at 16:00 at our stand B97 is time for the open debate on T-Bonds auction portal. Feel welcome to come and join the discussion.

By Alexandru Vinogradov, 17 September 2013.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

9:30 in the morning today and we began talking about the Financial Tribes of the Future in Community Room 3. Guess the topic appeals to many, as we enjoyed the biggest crowd ever at an Allevo session at Sibos. Not to mention having such experienced speakers in the panel with such valuable opinions and ideas was a big plus; listening to them is simply time well spent.

With Mircea Mihaescu – Director of the Sberbank Technology Research Center in Moscow (@MirceaMihaescu), Matteo Rizzi – Partner SBT Venture Capital (@matteorizzi), Radu Ghetea – President & CEO of CEC Bank, our own Corina Mihalache – Director Business Analysis in the panel and Rodica Tuchila, Director at the Romanian Banking Association moderating the session, the discussion sparkled with great ideas, intelligent remarks and humorous intervensions.

They looked for answers to questions like: What’s the impact of technological evolution on financial infrastructures? How will the demand-supply chain take shape and how will trade be financed? How do you assess the future of payments intermediated by banks or financial institutions? What do you believe will be the cooperation respectively the competition space? How do you perceive knowledge and assets sharing? Will people gather in tribes or rather more evolved and regulated packs?

https://prezi.com/embed/y8ajr8zyeqlp/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined

Not to lose the actual flavour of the event and the ideas presented, I decided to share with you some of the most interesting quotes from our panelists:

Matteo Rizzi: “First time after 12 years I will speak for a different company in a panel.” Thank you for joining Matteo.

Radu Ghetea: “The banking system should be reengineered, the key is technology. Something should always stay in banking: lending.”

Mircea Mihaescu: “All players do lending using new technologies. We cannot rely on governments to always help out.”

Radu Ghetea: “The future is very challenging and we should reinvent the banking business by creating the environment bringing trust back.”

Mircea Mihaescu: “Prepping coffee takes 10% of the time, 90% is ordering & paying. The future is already here, it’s not widely deployed.” And continuing on that example: “The Starbucks guy should know me, I don’t have to carry cash.” The conclusion: “Payments will disappear in the background, they’ll be like wifi.”

Matteo Rizzi: “The number of banks that have crowd* or co* in their title has exploded in the past years.” Even though, “it took 3 weeks for a bank to give me my credit card, if they googled they would have had 85% of the info the bank asked.”

Mircea Mihaescu on cooperation vs competition: “We collaborate today using tools coming from technology vendors. We need to collaborate explicitly. ”We live in a same apartment building, we share the same door and we need to share the same trust.”

Matteo Rizzi: “There are spaces that cannot move forward without collaboration – trust for example.”… “out of trust you can create services and this should give banks another view of what’s coming to disrupt.”

Corina Mihalache: “Payments and all processing of financial transactions are a commodity, financial institutions should not reinvent the wheel for every technology that they use. The competition should be at the end customer and not at the back office of the banks.”

And on sharing knowledge…

Matteo Rizzi: “The problem of shared knowledge comes from the banks themselves. Companies need to become connected companies before sharing.”… “Skills are spreadsheets in HR but not available to people who need to deploy projects.” “Knowledge tends to travel way waster and be there to be used. Large banks conglomerate through mergers and acquisitions.”

On the same concept, which is the core of our initiative to create an open source platform for financial transactions processing (our FinTP project), Corina Mihalache simply said “We have a dream.” “We started building a business and community to share our product. If anyone else has done it before, share it!”

Radu Ghetea: “Allevo has been talking about open solutions for some years now. Banks should cut on expenses, they need to think twice before investing in new technology. Open solutions are welcome.”

Mircea Mihaescu: “It is safer to use open source algorithms for encryption of security systems. Allevo puts banking in the OS domain.”

And coming up to the tribes:

Mircea Mihaescu: “Definitely people will tend to connect in smaller tribes, in value groups to serve their interest and their passion.”

Radu Ghetea: “It should be a normal thing to gather and brainstorm as often as possible.”

And Matteo and Corina are “definitely for tribes!”.

I especially liked when Mircea Mihaescu said “I drink coffee, I’m in that tribe; I love skiing, I’m in that tribe; I’m in banking, I’m in that tribe.”

At the end, the Q&A session spread for so long that they had to kick us out of the community room, cause they had no time left to prepare it for the next session.

I could not end this post without thanking Chris Skinner for attending our session and especially for writing an entire article on his blog about Financial Tribes of the Future. We liked it so much, that we also posted it on our blog.

On @A11evo you can find all the tweets with more quotes and impressions from the session.

And you can checkout the entire set of photos from the session here.

By Alexandru Vinogradov, 17 September 2013.

Allevo – Exhibitor at Sibos Dubai

Month: September 2013

“The future bank will be the one with biggest (inter)network

Open Source