One thing that’s definitely different is that it seems impossible to find places that serve dinner past 10pm or exhibitors who serve much other than sweets throughout the day.

Year after year, Allevo is present. And year after year, like us at Allevo, everybody awaits to see what Sibos brings new. Well, this year it was Sibos University. A quite interesting initiative, I might say. Maybe inspired two years ago in Osaka, the SWIFT Institute describes its programme with a Japanese proverb: “Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher”. But their intention was to bring not one, but many such inspiring teachers. ” Therefore, leading academics will give 30-minute lectures on a wide range of topics impacting the global financial industry, including data privacy, cloud and the trends in financial information infrastructure, Kenya’s mobile money revolution, standards in a global world and financial inclusion. We’ll see at the end if this initiative was appreciated by Sibos attendees or not.

“One thing I can tell you is / You just got to be free” – free sharing that is. “Come together, right now.”

Not sure about all the connections our brain makes, but this Beatles’ song started playing in my head since morning while thinking about the FINkers United Get-Together that we hosted this afternoon.

We organized this event to introduce the FinTP Project – Allevo’s venture of creating the first application for processing payments and financial transactions in general, distributed under free open source license (GPL v3) – and the FINkers United community to the Sibos audience. It was a time when financial thinkers’ enthusiasts around the globe put their minds together to think of ideas to enrich the FinTP application. It was a time for idea generating networking with our peers. It was a good time, accompanied by a few glasses of Prosecco and lots of good vibes .

Now that the contest just kicked-off, we renew our invitation to all Sibos attendees to take part in this idea competition.  Even if you are not a contributor to or acquainted with FinTP yet, we are curious to know what you think fit to implement in or on top of FinTP to extend or enrich its utility. It can be anything, varying from a tool that can make the life of developers, testers, business analysts better to a new feature for handling a certain type of standard or a report designed for business oriented people or even a change to the fintp.org portal. We want to know what you think FinTP needs. And for that, we have created a space where you can post your ideas for enriching FinTP and rate the ideas of other participants.

To help you for the contest, here is a short video explaining FinTP.

During Sibos, the online voting is open on fintp.org. You can share your ideas in any way that you like (twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, emails) to make sure they get voted by your peers. The idea with the biggest rating will be awarded a techie watch on the last day of Sibos, Thursday October 2^nd 16:00 at the Allevo Stand F79. The sole requirement is for the owner of the idea to physically be there to collect his or her prize. Furthermore, all ideas will be taken in front of the FINkers United board who will select those fit to be planned for future releases of the FinTP Project.

With day one in the past, we are looking forward to day two at Sibos, an important day for Allevo as we are presenting a project we hold close to our heart: BOOST – Banking On Open Source Technologies. The dedicated session will be held in Conference Room 1, at 16:00. Join us in imagining an open FinTech world, a world nurturing cooperation and idea sharing in areas that do not constitute as differentiators to the business of the institution and concentrating to fiercely compete to the best fulfillment of end customer needs.