Last week I attended Money2020 in Copenhagen. There are quite a few known voices in the blogosphere who have already reviewed the event and concluded it was extremely well organized for its first go on the European stage.
Duena Blomstrom – Money 2020 Europe – this is how we rolled “[..] it had a trendy, hipsterish, festival feel to it. Which made it an experience.”
Chris Skinner – The Finanser’s Week: 4th April – 10th April 2016 “Considering it’s the first time they’ve run Money2020 over here, it’s pretty impressive to have over 3,500 people attending”
Matteo Rizzi – Money2020 could have happened 6 years ago, and be called Innotribe “[…] Jonathan and Anil really nailed it. They manage to organize the biggest FinTech event in Europe (please, do not compare it with Sibos when it happens in Europe, that would be a mistake)”
Oscar Williams-Grut – 3,000 bankers, techies, and investors held a summit in Europe this week — here’s what everyone was talking about “Forget killing the banks — it’s all about working with them now”
Paymenteye.com – 5 things we heard about payments at Money2020 + Day 2
The one phrase praise for the Money2020 team from my behalf is: excellent logistics, extremely convenient location, cool marketing collaterals, very participant centric (not much email spam as for other similar industry events, easy to set meetings, easy access, casual environment, food, beverages and a little spice like icecream, pancakes, DJ Rudimental show), relevant participants – quite senior audience, open to FinTech and to talking to people -, diverse agenda with great speakers, great opportunity to meet all “the usual suspects” under the same roof. The only things I would work on are the wifi, scaling the app for times when everyone tries to log in, putting a small agenda together with the badge (the brochure was lovely, but VERY big and heavy) and adding some more controversial content.
Controversial content. This is maybe the thing that is most missed at FinTech events of today. I would love to sit in a session where the title is interesting and where the participants do not fall on the same page. I would like to see an argument, a debate. I’m growing a bit tired to see all these politically correct ways of let’s agree to disagree on things like crypto-currencies, blockchain, regulation, omni-channel, open APIs, building diverse teams, customer experience etc.
The best panel award goes to: “The R3 initiative: How incumbents can capitalize on the value of ledger technology”. David Birch, Simon Taylor and Richard Brown nailed it, explaining how R3 will use distributed ledger technology to revolutionize financial applications.
A few notes from the heard at Money2020 series:
– Banks in the 90s thought IT was a static one time only investment (@chrisskinner).
– Bitcoin fee for a transaction of value 1M$ is around 4 cents, more or less the same as what SWIFT charges per transaction. Thus friction lies elsewhere.
– FinTechs ask for regulation to get credibility in front of their customers.
– Blockchain should be used to state that you have the data, not for storing data
– Anyone who does anything in compliance to make it better, quicker, cheaper wins.
– Invisible frictionless payments: checkout is the new checkin
– Focus has shifted towards the customer because of the commoditization of payments (*reason why Allevo migrated from a traditional distribution model to an open one, starting with FinTP, an application that achieves integration and flow automation, addressing compliance for back-office operations of banks). Mobile phones are a commodity as well. The layer on top of the commodity is what matters.
– There needs to be some sort of balance between being relevant and being creepy as far as data algorithms are concerned.
– Cash, mobile, Internet of Things and cards will coexist in the future.
All in all, it was an interesting week, with a bit of everything and it did feel a bit like a FinTech on the fly industry update, combined with a catch-up with old friends and partners.
Allevo’s short term focus, except for the plans outlined here, is on promoting open applications for banks, corporations and other types of financial institutions. We aim to show that open source apps are easier and quicker to adopt and implement. They also assure both efficiency and transparency for back-office operations and offer compliance to industry standards. More in future posts and here.
