This year Madrid was chosen as the town fit for hosting such an event, the conference and exhibition taking place at the beautiful Feria de Madrid convention center.
We have by the past exhibited at this event with our former identity, Business Information Systems, 2011 being a premiere for presenting ourselves under the new trade name of Allevo.
There is a very rich amount of information on EBADay, which has traveled over Twitter with the speed, well not with that of light, but with that of web 2.0. Even our Allevo Daily was 50% taken over by EBADay stories, tweets, pictures & videos.
It is very interesting to get to see stories reported through such diverse pairs of eyes. Of course the Finextra guys did their utmost and came forward with a professional very Sibos-like TV: the EBADay TV, which could easily take more than just 2 days to fully follow. Then a whole lot of people shared insights plus their own understanding and opinions in either thorough blog posts or simple tweets. For someone who only virtually observes the event, such as myself, this type of community is a real gold mine. There’s plenty of things to see and a-ha moments to catch.
Judging from outside, the main word on everybody’s lips was, as announced and expected, the one and only: SEPA. It comes as no surprise that people calling for an end date of the end date have lately started to multiply.
My colleagues temporarily dispatched to Madrid confirmed that the main subjects of debate were centered around this topic: is there need for two distinct end dates or only one? One end-date for SEPA credit transfers and another one for direct debits or would it be possible to set one single *mandatory* deadline which could cover both?
Aside from the star of the show, SEPA, and other collateral boring subjects, such as Basel III regulations and alike, the next buzz word the EBADay tweet-cloud highlights is innovation. And something that always comes up when talking about innovation is collaboration. On collaboration I’m only going to quote JP Morgan’s James Barclay, whose line I picked up via EBAday 2011: the Sepa journey nears its end: “Collaboration has driven me to a shrink – the last stage of collaboration is an EBADay panel”.
So what my colleagues have shared of their own personal insights is that there is hope for SEPA after all. EBADay seems to have made people very optimistic on the subject or anyhow, more than before June 15th 2011.