After a hectic week in Amsterdam where days were starting much too early in the morning and ending only a few hours away from the following sunrise, we’re finally back in Bucharest, enjoying the cold and dump Dutch weather that was awaiting us here.
This is the third year in a row we’ve showed up at Sibos as exhibitors, co-partnering with one of our most valuable customers, the Romanian Ministry of Public Finance. Mr Laurentiu Andrei called it, in the brought to you by the community session he joined the panel of, “a strange apparition at Sibos” adding that “as far as I know we are the single governmental institution which performs its business using banking tools and being directly connected to SWIFT and financial market infrastructures”.
I can say this was by far the best Sibos ever for us, from all points of view. First of all, we’ve organized the Streamlining the Financial Chain Ecosystem session, were strong messages were delivered, sustaining our latest solution development approach: going as a service and addressing a broader range of industries and customers. The following day, our CEO joined the panel of the brought to you by SWIFT session, Workers’ Remittances: Your global platform for person-to-person payments.
Then, we had an incredible success, even greater than anticipated, with this year’s two novelties: the Payments as a Service and the Workers’ Remittances solutions, dragging brand new customers (and I do not say visitors) to our stand, determined to see a demo of the product. Corporates, commercial banks, service bureaus and partners, they all gathered to see how we implemented these solutions and how we managed to make them work.
For those who, for different reasons, couldn’t attend Sibos 2010, we’ve reported live, keeping track of events of interest and also contributing to this exclusive financial community SWIFT has built through yearly Sibos events. Our online presence focused on publishing day per day blog updates with fresh insights right from the heart of Sibos and quick tweets with most important pieces of information. Here’s a tweet cloud containing the most used buzzwords in the #bisatsibos twitter stream.
And, as a little spice, I’ve also managed to steal one minute of Lazaro’s precious time, to get a picture taken with him. For the record, he’s just as nice and friendly as he seems.
Now everyone’s looking forward to Toronto and hoping not to meet heavy snow or weird events (like Vienna & Hong Kong). Also, we’re hoping to show up only as Allevo by next year, thus putting an end to this long and somewhat painful rebranding process and starting a new era under this new name we’ve chosen for ourselves.