I am in Switzerland on a UK Trade & Industry (UKTI) trade mission visiting Zurich and Geneva.
The theme is FinTech and is a great opportunity for financial institutions and technology firms to meet, share ideas, and explore business opportunities.
With special thanks to Swiss FinTeCH Association and SIX Group Incubator F10 for helping make this happen.
Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance explained how London is leading the way with FinTech. The City of London providing not only a thriving ecosystem of technologists, financial institutions, service providers and capital, but also easy access to supportive Government and City Hall officials. Human interaction with key players, is always very valuable and more effective than digital communications alone.
Alexandre Gaillard, president of Swiss FinTech Association, described how FinTech is a vision we are all working towards. There is still a lot of work to do with regulators and the industry overall is in “catch-up mode”, but this is a revolution in the making. There are many opportunities to collaborate cross-border, with Switzerland and UK topping the rankings in terms of innovation.
Sponsor Green.ch, described their datacenter offering. And recommended that given the stringent privacy laws, anyone looking to serve Swiss customers should consider local hosting options.
Sponsor PwC explained their commitment to leadership in digital consultancy.
Sponsor Michael Page illustrated their global reach and commitment to stay on trend with the FinTech wave within the competitive resource management industry.
19 Delegates pitched an impressive, broad array of disruptive technologies to an audience of bankers, insurers, investors, innovators:
- “Banking as a Service” (Bankable, Quantstore)
- Blockchain tech (Credits)
- Borrowing and lending (Origin Markets)
- Contextual and Behavioural analytics (Sybenetix, Ancoa)
- Cyber-security and anti-fraud (Post-Quantum, Featurespace)
- Data management solutions (LiveDataset, Estatom)
- Easier tax paperwork (Connect Collective)
- Investment management & risk platforms (Allocator, Calastone, ClearMacro, Percentile, Prophis Technologies, Raise Partner)
- Payments (PiP Payments)
- Wine-as-an-asset (Wine Owners)
Ryan Kalish, Allocator
Richard Maton, Sybentix
I explained how LiveDataset disrupts the all-pervasive corporate spreadsheet, providing a “third way” for data management solutions. With the benefits of spreadsheets (fast and flexible) and purpose-built systems (scalable and controlled.
After the presentations UKTI had arranged one-to-one sessions between the financial and technology firms, for some very productive discussions.