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NEWS Cautious optimism at SWIFT London event
Henry Vilar reviews SWIFT Business Forum London 2017, which took place at Tobacco Dock in Wapping on 25th April
Junior Reporter Henry Vilar
cycle.” That’s the view of Mark Beeston, Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Financial Management, speaking at the event.
“W
Javier Perez-Tasso, Chief Executive for Americas and UK at SWIFT, spoke of a gathering with “resilience and innovation against a backdrop of uncertainty” at its heart. “As a Spanish guy, I’m not even going to get into the topic of Gibraltar,” he quipped.
Every speaker championed topics like distributed ledger technology and new payments systems, but stiffened their sinews when mentioning Brexit or cybercrime. While topics like globalisation, challenging startups and new regulations might only seem to be a minor nuisance for many of the big players, cybercrime, a global political landscape in disarray, and a resulting sense of distrust, were, to say the least, big and worrisome topics underlying every discussion panel. Thus, we saw panels with ominous titles like “Evolving Geopolitical Landscape – How will it Impact Financial Crime Compliance?” and “Threats and Opportunities of Open Banking”.
Yawar Shah, Chairman at SWIFT, opened the event with a call for trust and cooperation to build a future together. “Cybercrime is now global, more organised and more sophisticated than ever”, he warned the audience, as he stressed the importance of being prepared and taking pre- emptive actions on security. The following panel discussed the idea that innovation technologies won’t succeed unless they’re prepared to bridge the gap between customers and processes, and in terms of security, it cannot be any
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e’re at the cusp of a global FinTech
different.
As expected, DLT was the talk of the town. “People think of blockchain as a technology, or as simply Bitcoin, but we need to think of it as a concept. It is the idea of decentralisation and how it can change each of our industries,” said Michele Curtoni, Emerging Technologies Strategy, LSEG. Decentralisation became a buzzword, where it was stressed how, in order for blockchain to be welcomed by non-experts, it needs to be perceived as a new type of business philosophy.
“The technology is readily available, well-structured, deep and most of all safe. The business models to follow are also there. We have seen this in the past and we know we can do it. We just don’t have the regulation, or know how it will work,” added Jeroen van Oerle, Trend Analyst at Robeco. “That is a process that will take some time, and needs investment and trust. But who is going to invest in a technology that doesn’t stand on its own, that needs a whole community to make it work, and when they will start seeing benefits in five years?”
“I believe standards won’t be an obstacle. We will be able to create new standards exclusively for DLT, based on legacy standards, or marry DLT with legacy standards,” said Thorsten Peisl, CEO at RISE Financial Technologies. To that, van Oerle added: “Distributed ledger technology shouldn’t be [managed] by one central authority. That’s [the opposite] to decentralisation.”
Lastly, Peisl argued that a strategic element was
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