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MONEY20/20 EUROPE
Money20/20 Europe roundup – buzzwords, superheroes and startups
Staff Reporters Alex Hamilton and Henry Vilar
theme quite like the one that assailed our eyes and ears at Money20/20 Europe. Fintech superheroes were abound, from DarkWeb to Dr. StrangeRegs, and the Bella Centre in Copenhagen was awash with comic-book colour. Thousands descended on the conference hall, leaving keynote speaker Jack Dorsey, of Twitter and Square fame, to exclaim “wow, that’s a lot of people” when he turned up on stage.
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Despite the razor-sharp content of his discussion, it’s easy to see that Dorsey is a developer and not a public speaker. Those who expected a startup’s dynamism and boundless energy were instead treated to a rather flat delivery while sat on a sofa. Dorsey extolled the virtues of just “getting on the with job” and told fintechs in the audience to stop talking and start doing. The Square founder spoke of how his company has only ever had one vision – helping merchants take payments – and how that one goal had driven them to success (so far).
The regulation Fintech deserves, but not the one it needs right now
Those who arrived with trepidation that blockchain would once again take over the conversation were treated to a brand new buzzword. PSD2 rose from the shadow of distributed ledger technology to become
t’s safe to say there hasn’t been a conference
the overarching discussion point at the conference. Bankers that IBS Journal spoke to were worried and complacent, struggling and confident, bullish and confused. JP Morgan executive director for product solutions in Europe, Brian Gaynor, admitted that there might be a few “sweaty brows” in the industry as the regulation looms over them. He did add, though, that “any organisation implanting a change will have a sweaty brow.”
No wonder, as there are some rumours of PSD2 being the end of institutionalised traditional banking. Eric van der Kleij, CEO at the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4DR), pointed out that loyalty to legacy banks will start gradually fading, as the storage of information will not be unique to that bank. The truth is that there is no way to know how the directive will come out in actuality, as many execs have confessed to IBS. A lot of the plans to leverage data-sharing are finding it hard to make it pass the drawing board stage, as the lack of specifics at this moment means that they don’t know in detail where to go from here.
Great AI comes with great responsibility
Elsewhere, on a show floor that included both a barbershop, masseurs and a working video game arcade, the talk switched to AI and automation. One VP told IBS Journal over a drink that AI will be “probably more annoying than blockchain” in terms of speaker’s slots and discussion panels. That opinion was certainly not shared by IBM’s Vivek Bajaj. The global VP of Watson Financial Services was enthusiastic over what AI can do for the regulatory space. Why place your oversight in the hands of hundreds of error-prone humans when a deep
www.ibsintelligence.com © IBS Intelligence 2017
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