20 years of SWIFT in Romania were celebrated yesterday, October 11th as the 3rd edition of SWIFT Business Forum was organized by ARB (Romanian Banking Association), with the support of Allevo.
Granted with the presence of elite representatives of both SWIFT and the Romanian banking and financial industry, the event covered past, present and future. It started with a very nice video showing pictures of the SWIFT “family” in Romania, giving participants the chance to walk down on memory lane and remember some nice times.
The first half of the event was dedicated to the SWIFT strategy and update, SWIFT 2015 into practice, as well as discussing the impact of new regulation for the financial and banking market, what are the main challenges and the current status of European initiatives in payments and securities (SEPA, TARGET2, etc).
The second half of the event was under the mark on interactivity. The 8 chat rooms offered guests the opportunity to hear and discuss, during 15 minutes workshops that ran in parallel, about what SWIFT and its partners have to offer.
In my opinion, the most interesting session was the last one. It was a free, open and engaging discussion on innovation and collaboration in the financial and banking industry. The four panelists: Kosta Peric, Head of Innovation at SWIFT and Co-Founder of Innotribe, Mircea Mihaescu, Director, Sberbank Technology Research Center, Marc Delbaere, Head of Standards Research and Development and our own Sorin Guiman, General Director Allevo talked about the challenges and opportunities of the new landscape, innovative solutions and products.
On a more personal note, I want to add that, while supporting ARB with the event organization, inspired by Innotribe‘s outstanding events and doing what they taught us at FINkers United, we took on scribing during the event.
This is what came out, hope you like it 🙂
By: Ioana Moldovan