Vienna – Hong Kong – Amsterdam – Toronto

Toronto was our 4th consecutive achievement as being one of theexhibitors at Sibos. And the first under the Allevo umbrella,which, surprisingly enough, everybody was aware of, so we did nothave a lot of trade name rebranding explaining to do.

A very short history of these last 4 Sibos-es was stated byGottfried Leibbrandt (@GeoLeib) at the closing plenary:Vienna was about denial and disbelief, Hong Kong was about anger,Amsterdam was about acceptance and Toronto is about action.

The plenaries & the rest of the sessions opened up somesubjects for debate. There were stated things such as follow themoney, as money’s moving East; Brazil is going to rise as one ofthe strongest countries; banking isn’t about a place you goanymore, it’s about a thing you do; innovation means make itrelevant, make it simple; SEPA end-date; mobile payments; etc.

The best thing about all these sessions is that they can bewatched through the Virtual Sibos platform till the end ofthe year. Thus a super busy Sibos participant can see of his or herown agenda with a lighter heart in regards to sessions missed.Exceptions are the more interactive sessions for which theexperience cannot be reproduced online, such as Innotribe’sunconferenced events. These alone generated a number of tweetsconsiderably higher than those of sibos itself.

And what novelties did we bring to thetable?

Every year we make sure we have at least one or two new catchythings to show off with. This year we brought a newsignature-based biometric identification mechanismintegrated into our qPayIntegrator. It is a very catchy gadget usednot only to authenticate and authorize users into the system, butalso to approve high value payments exceeding a certain amount.Unlike most other biometric identification methods out there, thisone is based as well on the dynamics of the signature, not just onits shape.

Another cool thing we showed up with is our solution forcorporations. For large companies, paying lots ofsuppliers, taxes, wages and so on and keeping a third eye on theirmultitude of bank accounts, a product on which they can rely on forautomating and centralizing all these day to day operations can bea gold mine: one single window to the bankingworld.

Last, but not least, we revealed our idea for our next majorproject: publishing qPayIntegrator under free GPLlicense. Of course, this is an initiative which will taketime to come to life, but we’ve started gathering our customers’and partners’ feelings about it. I was glad to hear all thego-for-it types of reactions and I was even happier to hear thedon’t-even-think-about-it ones – some aren’t too thrilled with theidea and I can understand why.

The subject was approached in a round-table discussion organizedby Allevo, in which people debated what it would mean to bring thisfree open source software model into the paymentsarena. It seems to be a good lead and we’ve set our mindson going down this road.

Corina Mihalache was a panelist in the “Financialinteroperability and open source” session; she made a high levelapproach, explaining how our idea can enhance interoperability andcooperation between various entities of the financial industry.

Today I can say that the project has officially beenkicked-off within our company and I cannot wait for the goto market phase. I think there’s going to be loud noise around itslaunch, with truly disruptive consequences in this ecosystem ofbanks and corporations and MFIs and SSBs.