Key take-aways from the day
With huge advancements in fintech in the past couple of years, it has never been a more exciting - or daunting - time to innovate in financial services. With change comes opportunity: the challenge now is to harness and use the tools available to solve business problems, which is often easier said than done.
Against this backdrop, FinovateEurope returned to London in February 2019, bringing 64 demoing companies and 120 expert speakers from the most cutting-edge innovators in the industry to our pan-European audience.
We pride ourselves on bringing a huge range of viewpoints and perspectives covered from across the fintech ecosystem, and FinovateEurope 2019 was no different. Often imitated, but never replicated, our unique demo format once again put innovation front and centre on the stage, showcasing the new transformative solutions being built across every sector of fintech imaginable. Meanwhile, across two content days, innovations from Investech and wealthtech, to product innovation and the customer experience, to the future of challenger banks and open banking, were covered in depth.
As Sohail Raja, Chief Digital Officer at Société Générale, said during the panel on cultural and technical digitisation, the developments of Alibaba and Amazon have made the technology “cycle faster and shorter – we need to take that on board for what clients want and what we offer.” Taking to the stage shortly before this, Amazon’s Giulio Montemagno talked delegates through exactly that, explaining how the global giant is defining and shaping its offerings by honing in on what customers want, and the ways that voice commerce is set not just to redefine customer experience, but to totally revolutionise the ways we live and buy on a daily basis.
Developing strategies to engage with customers in the ways they want has become increasingly challenging in the digital era, and was a theme that cropped up time and time again. Russell Pert, UK Industry Head of Financial Services at Facebook, showed the future of loyalty was reliant on building relevant, meaningful one to one interactions, at scale, while demos from Qwil Messenger, REACH, and 24sessions showed delegates the latest cutting edge technologies available to improve the customer experience through better online engagement.
Closing the third day, three of the biggest global influencers in fintech took to the stage to put the fintech world to rights in a live Breaking Banks podcast recording. In an enlightening and entertaining final session, Jim Marous, Brett King, and JP Nicols covered everything from predicting the impact of Brexit on the European fintech scene, to exploring the effects of Trump on and US regulatory pressures - truly, no fintech stone was left unturned!
With uncertainty abound as to how open banking will affect financial services, FinovateEurope brought delegates in-depth discussions on how open banking is driving disruption, creating innovation, and serving the underserved. A huge proportion of the demos, as well as expert industry practitioners at our dedicated Open Banking Summit, showcased how to maximise the opportunities of open banking, build APIs at scale, and embrace open banking as a fantastic way to innovate and to better serve customers.
While incredibly varied and diverse, what all of these sessions, products and debates had in common was the fact that the technology is only ever a means to an end - that the customer doesn’t care how their needs are met, only that they are met (or even exceeded!). Technology for the sake of technology will never be as important as intelligent, practical applications of these innovative technologies to meet a customer and business need - and it was this mindset that carried and galvanised the 1200 delegates through four packed days.
FinovateEurope, then, closed on an optimistic note. Yes, there is undoubtedly more uncertainty than ever before in financial services, and more threats from new players on the scene, but we as an industry have never been better equipped to meet these challenges head on, to succeed and thrive, and take advantage of the many opportunities to move forward.
See you next year!
