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EVENTS Shining fintech on the Emerald Isle
Ireland is making bold moves to push Dublin as Europe’s next biggest fintech hub. There wasn’t a major bank to be seen as tech firms flocked to the city for MoneyConf 2018
Senior Fintech Reporter Alex Hamilton
T
his would be the second time in as many months that IBSJ has flown into Ireland’s capital. The venue for MoneyConf 2018 was the RDS, a building south of the city and nestled among
leafy streets and Americanised bank branches (it is, after all, where the American embassy is based).
The show, a child of Web Summit, rolled into town with much fanfare. 5,000 delegates were in attendance, from more than 70 countries. It featured a number of fintech luminaries among the speakers and guests and the anti-bank feeling was almost palpable, especially as none had shown their faces with stands on the conference floor.
In the opening talk, Square CFO Sarah Friar took on the issue of gender and racial equality in the industry. She said she was really “peeved” that only 26 of the Fortune 500 were led by women. Just waiting and saying things will get better is not good enough, Friar stated. It’s time for companies in the fintech industry to start hiring processes that look directly for women or people of colour.
She said she’d been surprised when asking recruiters to find female candidates that they would come back and say there were none out there: “None? In the whole world?” You must push back, she added, and enforce the idea that you want to hire more diversely: “Just. Go. Get. Women.”
Friar also spent time opining that incumbent banks in the finance industry will struggle to innovate in the years to come.
“The finance part of fintech is a space that has not been very disrupted,” said Friar. Change is afoot, though, and new companies will always get the benefit of modern systems and a cohesive build from the get-go. New companies, she added, are always willing to try new things.
New companies are always better at agility too. Sometimes, said Friar,
just getting an NDA from a bank can take “forever”, which doesn’t bode well for their futures. Square is always looking to “build, buy and partner”, and is thinking about branching out into the omnichannel space, which Friar said is something that will drive the company’s growth for the future.
The payments firm is looking at expansion in Canada, the UK, Japan and Australia. It also has its eyes on Brazil, Mexico and India. When asked by John Fraher of Bloomberg – also on stage – about China, Friar said the country was “a different beast” entirely. It looks like TenCent and AliPay will continue to dominate without Western competition, then.
The API revolution
Later in the day, the ever-present spectre of Open Banking appeared, as a panel featuring N26, Starling Bank and Deutsche Bank tackled the subject. While Edward Robinson of Bloomberg made a brave attempt to reign in members of the panel, the session took off into a lively debate, with Starling Bank founder and CEO Anne Boden taking the lead.
www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2018
Diarmuid Greene/MoneyConf via Sportsfile
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