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NEWS
Swift Business Forum: Innovation and digitisation
Reporter Alex Hamilton
Innovation, innovation, innovation. The word crops up more and more these days and it was certainly a focus at the Swift Business Forum, which took place in London during April.
bankers made up a vast majority of the audience, but there was also a smattering of different industries in attendance.
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Despite being a conference focused on technology there were some stuttering starts as microphones and sound systems failed. Eileen Burbidge, Partner at Passion Capital and FinTech Envoy for HM Treasury, managed to circumnavigate the problems with poise, however. She hailed the Business Forum as a great chance to assemble people outside of the Square Mile and open up dialogue about the future. “I don’t think innovation is new to financial services,” she said. “It’s a credit to the industry that innovation is coming from both the incumbents and emerging players.”
Burbidge closed with an interesting statement: “I don’t think we’ll be talking about FinTech in 10 years, technology is always a part of the sector but we won’t be speaking about it as a separate thing.”
The ever-marching pace of change was a theme that continued into the first panel discussion of the day – based on “building the future”. Marion King, Director of Payments at RBS, hailed the UK as “one of only six countries that have more electronic payments than cash”.
Contactless payments have been around for a long time, she added, but adoption on the London Underground helped the concept take off. On the subject of legacy technology (another hot topic at the event), King said that the need for new solutions would be a key facilitator for
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urveys conducted onsite showed that
growth as more institutions look towards open banking and an API economy.
Andrew Hauser, Executive Director of Banking, Payments and Financial Resilience at the Bank of England, steadied the ship somewhat by telling the audience that, “if there’s one thing a central bank has to do it is to keep a grip on stability.”
“We don’t want to be the man from the ministry who says ‘no’,” he said before adding that “No” is still never far from the Bank of England’s vocabulary. “We have to understand change and adapt as a central bank – otherwise we might not be able to do the job we need to do. We can’t afford to be Google”.
Blythe Masters, CEO of blockchain firm Digital Asset Holdings, asked why everyone was paying attention to innovators when big banks were matching them blow for blow. “Facebook has 10,000 engineers,” she said. “Guess how many Wells Fargo has? 10,000.” Big banks are just as potent a force for change as FinTech startups. Still, she added, “the industry is facing the kind of existential threat where sometimes the best solution is to exit business altogether.”
Swift was founded 40 years ago, chimed in Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO at the company (pictured), but the underlying ideas in the firm haven’t changed much. “All we did was harness a new technology and make it available. It’ll be interesting to see if now it’s the right time
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