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EVENTS Finovate Europe: a fintech pageant


Held at the ExCel conference centre in London from 6-9 March, this year’s Finovate had a bit of a unique flavour. PSD2 and Open Banking have opened doors for fintechs, and they’re not willing to let that opportunity slip away


Junior Fintech Reporter Henry Vilar


F


intechs, fintechs everywhere. In the upcoming months, we will undoubtedly start seeing more and more financial technology companies reaching their arms out to banks and other long- established financial institutions. And the responsibility for this is none other than PSD2 and Open Banking, the two long-awaited bodies of regulation set to shake up the way we have been doing business until now. And not only that but more importantly, the way providers and consumers conceive and interact with financial institutions.


Marc Staehli, head of sales and CMO at Crealogix, explained the need for these fast-moving fintechs with an obvious analogy. He compares large financial institutions’ systems to big oil tankers, able to transport very large amount of cargo, but slow and possesing little manoeuvrability. Fintechs, however, are like fast boats which are able to navigate swiftly around obstacles, in shallow waters. Fintechs can provide banks with that layer of agility to keep up with the current digital demands that large systems will always be trying to catch up with.


Welcoming customers


A noticeable trend during the event was the presence of companies working on KYC processes that would speed up customer onboarding. In the past year, regtech has been increasingly on the rise. For digital banks who boast of thinking on their feet, checking whether their customers are real or not must be done quickly, digitally and remotely.


Onfido’s solution addresses just that, with an interface that is easy to recognise from Monzo’s or Starling’s onboarding process. The answer is being able to read a person’s documentation and back-check it with databases; at the same time it can verify whether a person is real by asking them to say some numbers out loud in front of the phone’s camera. On the other hand, iProov’s CEO Andrew Bud tell us, very excitedly, that his solution can verify whether a face is real or digital just with software, outdoing Apple’s Face ID hardware capabilities and ditching the “repeating numbers” feature.


Hooyu’s and Lleida.net’s solutions tackle the same issue – digital KYC into the onboarding process, or eKYC, as the latter calls it. They all employ different methods: Hooyu is a P2P ID verification service,


A relevant area in which the consumers will benefit even more than by speeding up the onboarding process – which benefits banks more than anything – is personal financial management or PFM. For example, some fintechs have fancy interfaces, such as Crealogix’s, which uses a gaming engine to facilitate sending money, checking expenses and so on.


However, the one that caught the eye is Meniga’s app. Meniga is an Icelandic company that aggregates, manages and tracks expenses from all user cards through its app. While it is currently partnering with banks and other institutions to allow it to implement its features, the company has been using its home country as a testing ground for its fantastic app, which means that it has every single element applied, and it’s free and independent from any other bank.


These have been just a few of the many companies at the event, which are eager to see the financial industry change, little by little. The rising customer demands and regulatory framework is making it mandatory for companies to look out for fintechs than can give them a hand, and Finovate is always an excellent place to start.


Fintechs have been likened to speed boats


while Lleida.net helps institutions keep up with their notification and contracting tasks, as well as having identification services. The array of companies to choose just proves that fintechs are many and varied, but they provide layers of service that institutions are lacking.


PFMs and other acronyms


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Felix Brönnimann/pixabay


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