Category: Banks

Phoenix organisations in the financial industry: where are they?

It’s FinTech unicorns all over the place these days. But where are the Phoenix organisations in financial services?

Keynote speaker and author Peter Hinssen wrote a book “The Phoenix and the Unicorn”, and he is going to interview me about phoenix organizations in the financial industry for his blog in a few days.

As a big believer in the power of the network, I was wondering what your favourite phoenix companies were in banking and finance: those type of long lived companies that were able to stay relevant by reinventing themselves on a regular basis through business model, market, service and product innovation? Examples (in different industries) would be Walmart, Microsoft, Ping An and McDonalds.

It you take part, it would be great if you could suggest a company name and why you consider them a successful financial industry phoenix. To keep it simple and straightforward: just use the comments section of this post.

You’ll receive an e-book copy of Peter’s book ‘The Phoenix and the Unicorn’ if your suggestion makes the top 3!

The tyranny of the problem solver

still life Song Han

Still life by Song Han

The trigger for this post was an article on the nexxworks site about right & wrong in corporate innovation. The first paragraph focuses on the need to obsess on solving a customer problem. My friend and ex-colleague Kevin commented via LinkedIn:

“Fantastic article! I’ve been banging on for years about starting with the problem, that people care about but this is so much more articulate than me.”

We started a quick exchange on LinkedIn:

linkedin with kevin

The nexxworks article is about much more than problem solving, but problem-solving is what I will be focusing on in this pamphlet/manifesto for creating what you want. As that is where I am coming from.

Not being problem focused seems almost a blasphemy these days. But we don’t realise we have been mis-framed for decades to be problem solvers and solutionists (“there is an app for that”).

It already happens in start-up pitches to start with. Start-ups are coached to pitch in a standard way. It goes back to Guy Kawasaki’s 10 slides to pitch: start with the problem, what is the solution, the team, the business model, etc, etc.

There are the Maddlibs to perfect your one-sentence-pitch. There even are Maddlibs to generate your strategy statement, based on a collection of blah-words (Thx to @swardley).

containers

Everything is “modelled” and vocabulary is standardised: we need MVP’s, lean start-ups, scale-ups, etc. It’s cool, but you then have to explain this new vocabulary to the rest of your troops.

Everything is “role-modelled”. And we get inspired by always the same use cases: Haier, Semco, Apple, Amazon, Uber, etc. We don’t seem to realise that these are exceptions. Only exceptions make the news. The exceptional is normalised, check out hyper-normalisation of Adam Curtis, albeit in another context.

“In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex “real world” and built a simple “fake world” that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.”

Everything is based on a Silicon Valley solutionist style, a reactive/responsive orientation, something our MBA’s and entre/intra-preneurs and leaders/managers have been trained for at nauseum: define the problem, articulate the solution, make a plan to execute, execute the plan with rigor, and be effective and efficient in doing so.

It may be a style semantic. Ex-Trump-PR-guy Sarramuci said: “you may dislike his (Trump’s) style, but he is very effective.” But one can be very effective at doing the wrong thing. One can be very effective at being a problem solver.

I think it’s more than about style. We have become so politically correct. To please everybody, we say things like “It’s probably a bit of both”. That way, confusion about the real intention creeps in. I say we must be opinionated, and we must be judgemental, we must choose sides.

taleb skin

We say those politically correct things because we don’t have skin in the game. Read Nicholas Taleb’s latest on that subject. For that reason Taleb hates consultants, professors at high schools, some managers and executives, and by extension heads/consultants of innovation. They can say whatever they want, it has no consequences, at least not for their existence or that of the organisation they represent.

I recently heard Nektarios Liolios from Startupbootcamp venting his frustrations on stage, as all the innovation efforts of the last decade have apparently not changed much, or at least not shipped anything substantial. They even start bypassing heads of innovation and innovation teams in general, as they are more and more seen as barriers between customers and the business units. They want to solve real business problems.

Innovation-powerhouse-eindhoven-janne-van-berlo_dezeen_2364_col_4

Innovation Powerhouse Philips Eindhoven – Architect Janne van Berlo
A renovation respecting the building's patrimonial structure.

But I am afraid that a focus on real business problems won’t help. The only way to enable real change and lasting innovation is changing the structure of an organisation.

Structure is about more than reporting lines and P&L units. Structure is about the coherence of narrative, motives, and governance.

  • The narrative is about purpose, about patrimony (tacit knowledge), “just-do-it” kind of mantra, action oriented. A narrative is rallying the troops to play the game in a certain way, in a certain context. In war, the game is to win. In business, I would hope it’s about more than winning a finite game, and there is some sense of moral, aesthetical and spiritual advancement, an infinite game across generations.
  • Motives are about why we are doing this. There are primary/primal motives like prestige, promotion, reciprocity and tic-for-tac rewards/punishments. Once you add moral, aesthetical, and spiritual advancement, you are driven by second level motivations that have to do with care, tradition, craftsmanship, beauty, proportion, etc. In that sense, I believe that problem solving is a primal motivation. A more advanced intention of creating something great is a second level motivation. So the question should not be “what problem are you trying to solve?” but “what do you truly want to create?” If not, “solving problems” becomes a doctrine, just like “customer first” is a doctrine, or “FNAO”, or “Lean” or “Agile”. Applied across the board without thinking whether it makes sense. Being effective at doing the wrong thing.
  • Governance is about how you organise and coordinate high quality flows to play the game in context. This is what real leadership is about. In that sense, innovation is a discipline. And there is nothing wrong with discipline. All great things/products/artworks have been a result of discipline. It is about “getting things done”. Jan Chipchase has an awesome fieldbook and practice for revealing – usually in plain sight – real customer needs. He articulates these needs as “desires on getting things done”. “Getting things done” is something quite different than “solving a problem”.

Artists don’t solve problems. Neither do real innovators. Did the iPhone start with solving a problem? Did Amazon ? Did Facebook? I don’t think so. They started with what they wanted to be, and what they wanted to create. They started with structure, if anywhere at all. But not with the problem.

A customer is IMO not looking for a problem to be solved. A customer is looking for a superior experience.

With that perspective, one could ask “Can organisations change?” to make that happen?  Or “Can people change?” and the more critical question, “Why would people change?”

sheep

Sheep in boxes - drone photograph by Dean Lewins

The answer again is structure. Change the structure, and change will not be hard, it will be natural.

That’s why the whole idea of the dual approach (separation castle/sandbox, or core/innovation) is flawed. It is the wrong structure.

The preferred structure would probably more resemble a Khasbah or Souks, an open city plan with many innovation cells/areas with maximum transparency for all, so that everybody is inspired and motivated to join those projects too. And “brutal force” (see below).

It’s a paradox of course. Already in 2002, Storey & Salaman said in their Theories about Process of Innovation:

“paradox is at the heart of innovation. The pressing need for survival in the short term requires efficient exploration of current competencies and requires ‘coherence, coordination and stability’; whereas exploration / innovation requires the discovery and development of new competencies and this requires the loosening and replacement of these erstwhile virtues”

Problem-solving is like design thinking: it is fundamentally conservative and preserving the status quo.

“Rational-experimental problem solving begins with a presumption that the search for a solution starts by relying on existing data about the problem. Design thinking, in a slight divergence from the original model, suggests instead that the designer herself should generate information about the problem, by drawing on her experience of the people who will be affected by the design through the empathetic connection that she forges with them”

Remains the question: can it be done in a big or conservative organisation? Yes, of course. And it is done through what I would call the “brutal force attack”. It is the only thing I have seen working in a bigger organisation to actually SHIP innovation into the market and seeing it picked-up by a substantial part of the target customer base.

The brutal force attack requires two things:

  • A visionary that is able to articulate in a compelling way what he/she wants to create (and it does NOT start with the problem to be solved). Often this person is somewhat hidden in the fabric/structure of the organisation
  • A CxO, usually a CEO with metaphorical balls who will do whatever it takes to make the vision happen. With skin-in-the-game. Even against some part of his/her executive team and/or against part of the Board. His/her position may be at risk. He/she is committed like a pig. (For an omelet with bacon, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed)

You then build a team to make this happen. A squad of the best of best in your company. And the project lead has a direct red telephone line to the CEO to call in case somebody puts barriers or antibodies to make the vision happen. Usually, it suffices just to threaten to pick up the red phone…

It can be as simple as that: just do it. Just build and ship what you want to create.

If you want to have some romanticised innovation story to go with it, sure, go ahead and organise start-up competitions, create innovation labs, bootcamps, accelerate, incubate, and make a lot of noise and corporate communication about it. Just be aware they are a lot of fun, give a lot of exposure, prestige, and status, but are not needed.

That’s why my mantra is “To inspire other people to dream”. To dream and imagine what they truly want to create.

Like in this Nike promo:

Don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they’re crazy enough.

Don’t buy the tyranny of the problem solver. Don’t settle to be a problem solver.

Create what you really want.

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Fintech 2017- Quo Vadis?

rt6517

Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor on the Quo Vadis filmset

Every year Jim Marous publishes the Top banking trends and predictions. On 21 Dec 2016, Jim published the sixth edition with predictions for 2017.

My input was a “pick-and-choose” list of bullet points. You can find the full list below. My input date was 27 Nov 2016. We are now two months later, and I captured some articles/announcements related to some these bullet points. And I added at the end some additional observations. All of this should be taken with more than a grain of salt, as I dimmed my focus on FinTech since starting my Petervan Productions sabbatical on 1 Nov 2016, and don’t read/research as much as before.

As always, these are 100% my personal opinions. Sometimes provocative, sometimes innocent, sometimes the cynical view of a 60 year old incumbent, but hopefully at times contrarian and inspiring. Here we go:

+++ start 27 Nov 2016 input

  • In general, 2017 will be the year of illusion, delusion, and distraction for and by FinTech.
  • Blockchain/DLT/etc will prove itself as one of the biggest distractions of this era in that it does not solve any existing problem, maybe it solves some future problems to be identified, but with a price to pay: the price of fundamental process re-engineering. Very few will be up to this task which involves community management and regulation.
  • In 2017, subject to pressures on the bottom-line and macro-political forces, banks will witness massive lay-offs and disinvestments in FinTech innovation labs and initiatives. These initiatives will be re-branded as research efforts, focused solely on incremental improvements in the core business lines.
  • FinTech will manifest itself as a techno fantasy, drawing attention away from the real problems to be tackled: cyber-security, trust and identity, which only can be solved through laser focused industry and government efforts. No single company can solve these on their own, and self-serving patenting will be counterproductive to industry-wide success.
  • In the US, the Trump administration will out-regulate innovation to protect the financial institutions fiefdoms and their control of money. But despite the Trumpian rhetoric and “opportunities” for financial institutions to start playing their old extraction-value games, financial institutions will be challenged by citizen uproar to give back to society.
  • Despite all these negative predictions, volume and frequency of FinTech investments will dramatically increase. Like in other industries, a 100M$ Fund will be considered as peanuts. Like in traffic jams, investments become bigger and last longer. Like traffic jams, ROI will be difficult to impossible to resolve.

+++ end 27 Nov 2016 input

What I am missing in many predictions is that most are just extrapolations of existing trends. They ignore the fact that the trend can just die or become a commodity where prices trend towards zero.

What I am missing is the creative/opportunity orientation (what do you want) vs. the reactive/responsive orientation (what problem are you trying to solve).

The way we think about change, disruption, and transformation) or whatever you want to call it) is going to be completely different in 5 years time. The speed of change is so big that our thinking is getting disrupted. The underestimated and ignored exponential power in all of this is the “power of networks”. I have another post in preparation for that, but in the meantime I would invite you to get familiar with following books and thinkers:

  • The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, by Joshua Cooper Ramo
  • Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, by Joi Ito
  • The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, by Kevin Kelly
  • “I wasn’t expecting that” from Simon Wardley’s upcoming book
  • Cloud wars by Simone Brunozzi
  • The end of cloud by Peter Levine from Andreesen Horovitz
  • Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology, by Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay and Mickey McManus (already from 2012, but so advanced in its thinking)

Rebelliously yours,

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Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day4 – Platform Cooperation

platform

Four weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I have revealed more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 . Today – 15 days before D-day – this post is the last in that series, and I will be looking into day-4.

We are now in the phase where all the artwork, design, session facilitation props, staging, lightning and special effects are coming together. We are now in nonstop back-to-back joint speaker calls to make sure our session cast, our speakers, our instigators, our producers, designers, and facilitators are full aligned. Some of the material we are producing for the big LED screen is of a beauty we have rarely seen in other event environments.

Yes, we try very hard to beat last year’s edition 😉

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC.

For the opening session of day-4, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and will zoom in into our Innotribe Industry Challenge on Compliance/KYC.

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Given that our day-4 is about the platform cooperation, our day anchor is Leda Glyptis, Director, Sapient Global Markets. She will stir the pot where needed during the day and she will come back at the end to wrap up the learnings of the day.

In between opening and closing, we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debate so you have the time to enjoy that session as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-4 is “Platform Cooperation”. In addition of the Opening and Closing sessions, we have four sessions:

  • Forward compatibility
  • FinTech Hubs session – APAC
  • DLT and cybersecurity: Sibos week wrap-up
  • Innotribe closing keynote: Platform Cooperation

This is a consolidation day – where it all comes together – and we will use a lot of metaphors and medieval painting examples to contextualise these rich topics, and to guide you through the disruptive complexity of our times

breughel

Pieter Breughel the Elder - The Blind Lead The Blind

Forward compatibility

I wrote a blog post about “forward compatibility” in March 2016, about how to avoid simplistic conversations on disruption.

That post was inspired by two conversations.

  • One conversation was in January 2016, with Angus Scott from Euroclear, and his key insight was that no disruption will happen without fundamental re-invention of the end-to-end business processes, and that requires what I now call “forward compatibility”, looking into big large scale experiments with real customers, real regulators, and real ecosystem stakeholders, aka not just in a Lab. Angus also injected the concept of broad macro-forces that drive change.
  • The other conversation was in March 2016 with Valerio Roncone and Tomas Kindler from SIX. They explained me how they were looking far ahead. Asking questions such a “what happens after T2S?”, or “what happens if DLT would fulfil its promise, and disinter-mediate existing players in the industry?”. How does the new landscape look like? Can we create “situational awareness” that can inform our strategy? They called this “impact oriented thinking” and “innovation through evolution”

The seeds were planted, and that was the embryo for this session.

red-line

 

I started playing around with this, and came up with the concept of “above and below the red-line”:

  • Below the red-line is what needs be be solved as a collective, as a community, as a platform. It’s stuff that no single company can really solve on it’s own. It’s things like DLT, Cybersecurity, Digital identity, etc
  • Above the red-line is where you partner with others, FinTech startups, established vendors, etc through JV’s, Partnerships, API’s, etc. It’s where you “complement” the platform under the red line

Throughout the week, we will have done some exercises, where we internalise the content from the speakers by mapping them above and below the red line, and see how they are relevant for banking, securities, and compliance.

This session is NOT a technical session for geeks. This session is a session for business strategists that are interested having a conversation on how we can move the collective forward from here to “there”, wherever and however the “there”emerges.

 

We have a BIG cast for this session, complemented by instigators, DLT/Cyber anchors and rapporteurs. This is the only session where I will be on stage as your moderator. The speakers and instigators for this session:

  • Angus Scott, Euroclear
  • Valerio Roncone, SIX
  • Tomas Kindler, SIX
  • Patrick Havander, Nordea
  • Paul McKeown, Nasdaq Financial Framework
  • Saket Sharma, BNY Mellon
  • Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger Linux Foundation

 

FinTech Hubs session – APAC – over lunch time

Building upon the success of last year’s session “Why banks need FinTech hubs?”, we wanted to go create more air-time for FinTech Hubs from different regions of the world.

We’ll have 6 speakers in one hour. That’s 10 minutes each to share their ambitions and plans. With our designers we are looking how we can make this an engaging experience and avoid having a series of 6 commercials. Like for all FinTech Hub sessions this session is full house.

The “6 from APAC” are (in order of appearance):

  • James Lloyd, Asia-Pacific FinTech Leader, E&Y
  • Markus Gnirck, Tryb
  • Sopnendu Mohanty, MAS
  • Zennon Kapron, FinTech China
  • Janos Barberis, FinTech HK
  • Asad Naqvi, Apis Partners

Almost all of the hubs presenting at Innotribe Sibos during these hub sessions are now part of the Global FinTech Hub Federation (GFHF) announced three weeks ago. See press-release here.

TheGFHF-Branding-Logo-Non-HD

The GFHF will premier their latest FinTech Hub Index (A benchmark of 20+ FinTech Hubs) at Innotribe Sibos 2016. I have seen the design and infographics for this Index, and they just look awesome. We will use some of them as backdrop for this session.

Sandwiches and soft drinks will be served in the Innotribe space.

DLT and cybersecurity: Sibos week wrap-up

johan_zoffany_-_tribuna_of_the_uffizi_-_google_art_project

The Tribuna of the Uffizi, by Johan Zoffany, 1772-8
A collection of paintings
Royal Collection, Windsor

As you for sure have noticed, we don’t have any DLT/Blockchain sessions in this year’s Innotribe Sibos programme. We did this on purpose for two reasons:

  • There are already a lot of DLT/Blockchain sessions in the main conference sessions of Sibos
  • We sense a certain fatigue on the topic

We set ourselves the challenge to create ONE session where you get an overview, a collection of insights from ALL the sessions related to DLT during the whole of Sibos.

So if you don’t have time to go to all of them, or you prefer to stay in the Innotribe space for the week, we’ll make sure you get the key learnings in this single wrap-up session.

And as we were at it, why not do the same with Cybersecurity? OK, let’s do that too.

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

In the general overview of Innotribe sessions above, you will see some sessions marked with the “B” sign (Blockchain) and some others marked with the “lock” sign (Cybersecurity). It means these sessions have some DLT/Cyber flavour to them.

To create a coherent summary during this Thursday wrap-up, we have appointed “Transversal DLT/Cyber anchors”. They stay in the Innotribe space for the whole week, and will report back their findings:

  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney
  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven

To cover DLT and Cyber from the other non-Innotribe sessions (aka the main Sibos sessions, Swift Lab, workshops etc, we are sending out our “rapporteurs”. Our Rapporteurs are:

  • Our DLT rapporteur is Oliver Bussmann, ex-CIO UBS
  • Our Cyber rapporteur is Assaf Egozi, CEO Kidronim, Israel

Our DLT/Cyber anchors and rapporteurs will have a special lanyards so you can recognise them easily.

 

Innotribe closing keynote: Platform Cooperation

After a short wrap up of the Innotribe week presenting the key findings of our programme, our closing keynote speaker Dr. Douglas Rushkoff will provoke and challenge all your assumptions.

Douglas

Rushkoff is a renown lecturer on media, technology, culture and economics around the world. His new book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity” (Amazon Affiliates link) argues that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all.

rushkoff-book-cover

“Every great advance begins when someone sees that what everyone else takes for granted may not actually be true. Douglas Rushkoff questions the deepest assumptions of the modern economy, and blazes a path towards a more human centred world.”–Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media about Rushkoff’s latest book.

Marketplaces in medieval times were far more human centred, fairer environments that the so called P2P sharing economy of Uber and AirBnB, which all have little to with sharing but much more with an extraction value economy where only a few (monopolies) take it all.

breugel-mideval-markets

A Medieval marketplace scene from Pieter Breughel the Elder.

 

After his talk, Doug will stay on our stand and take some time to do some book signings. He’ll have a couple of free books with him.

Rushkoff is one of those rare thinkers and speakers that challenge all your assumptions. We did something similar last year with Andrew Keen with his talk “The Internet is NOT the answer”. Many of you loved his energy as the Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley.

Think of Rushkoff as Andrew Keen on steroids. Not to be missed if you like to be inspired, if you like to be provoked.

 

teamhuman_redlogoname

Since publishing Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Rushkoff has answered more than 20,000 emails from his readers, one by one, individually. People, companies, mayors, cooperatives, towns and big corporations, all looking for ways to distribute prosperity more widely, start local currencies, build platform cooperatives, convert to employee ownership, offer dividends instead of capital gains, or crowdfund a bookstore.

Rushkoff realised it was not about him but about you and last week he launched Team Human, a weekly postcast on radio. “An intervention by people, on behalf of people”. All in delightful audio – perhaps the most intimate, enveloping medium yet developed.

Douglas Rushkoff looks deep into the question of reprogramming society to better serve humans. Rushkoff grapples with complex issues of agency, social justice, and all those quirky non-binary corners of life.

We are also  bit quirky, non-binary. That’s why we designed the Innotribe stand with a very industrial look on the outside but as a very human and welcoming space on the inside. We believe on the synergising effect of emotional and physical space.

  • That’s why the overarching theme of this year’s Innotribe Sibos is about the tension between technology and humanism in this fast changing and disruptive environment.
  • That’s why we use a lot of art, as art can help making sense beyond the tactics and the cognitive.
  • That’s why we have throughout our four days the concept of “above and below the red line”, as below the red line is what we need to solve as a collective, as a community, as an ecosystem.

It’s going back to the original intention of the not-for-profit cooperative structure, but mixed with some healthy activism. Ruskhoff calls this “Platform Cooperativism”

Hope the architecture of our Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme all starts making sense now?

img_5481-1-1

I will leave you with this painting/collage by Yasumasa Morimura “Blinded by the Light” from 1991. It’s a picture from a reproduction, discovered in the lobby of Le Meridien Hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, during my presence at the SparkCamp conference in 2015.

It is a modern interpretation of Breughel’s “The Blind lead the Blind” from 1568. See start of this post.

The landscape of both paintings is from a really nice area west of Brussels – an area named “Pajottenland” – and the chapel in the back of the paintings exists in a little village called “Sint-Anna-Pede“.

sint-anna-pede

It happens to be the place where I grew up the first 20 years of my life. I was living literately 200 metres from this chapel. So the Innotribe journey sort of brought be back to my roots. More about that after Sibos.

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe,@Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day3 – Man/Machine Convergence

man machine theme

Four weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I will reveal more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 (21 days left at the time of this writing).

Our preparations are in full swing. The first visual materials are coming in, and our designers have produced some very cool animations for the big LED screen. And we put a lot of effort to keep the architectural integrity  of the programme and the focus on intense learning experiences.

General structure:

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

 

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC.

For the opening session, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and for the Wednesday opening, we will zoom in into some of the startups from our  Innotribe Startup Challenge Latam.

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Given that our day-3 is about the man-machine convergence, our day anchor is Anju Patwardhan, Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, and ex-Chief Innovation Office of Standard Chartered Bank, where she was looking into AI and other FinTech innovations.She will come back in the day closing to wrap up the learning of the day.

In between opening and closing, we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debates so you have the time to enjoy those as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-3 is “Man-Machine Convergence”. This is going to be a super packed day. In addition of the Opening and Closing sessions, we have six sessions:

  • The Future Show Live
  • Digital Ethics
  • FinTech Hubs session – AMERICAS
  • AI for Financial Services
  • Innovation in cyber-security: Innovative defences to innovative attacks
  • Thingclash

The Future Show Live

Experience the future like never before with this innovative event concept designed for challenging decision makers.

Technology is changing our world exponentially and humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in the previous 300 years. Topics such as cloud/data security and privacy, automation and a potentially exponential technological unemployment, (very) big data, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, robotics, self-driving cars, drones and the Internet of Things are popping up everywhere, and the public interest (consumers as well as businesses) in ‘the future’ has never been higher. This session will show how exponential technological advancements will radically alter and re-boot the way we experience the world and interact with each other. Both consumers and businesses, organisations and governments will be strongly interested in this.

The Future Show Live is a live, multimedia and interactive format that presents ‘the future’ key challenges and opportunities. Designed and delivered by Europe’s leading futurist and author Gerd Leonhard, and produced by art director and film-maker Jean-Francois Cardella. This session will flow seamlessly into the session/conversation on digital ethics. To find more about Gerd, his work and his latest provocative book  “Technology vs. Humanity: The coming clash between man and machine” (Amazon Affiliated link), check out my blog post of a couple of weeks ago.

This will be very special. To put it in Gerd’s own words in his weekly newsletter:

Second, just in case you are close-by, the world premier of my new interactive live program (finally, sans clicker and the conventional slide-deck marathon) called The Future Show Live will happen at SIBOS / Innotribe 2016 in Geneva, on September 28 – watch out for the video recording soon afterwards. With TFSLive we will attempt nothing less than to redefine the very meaning of ‘keynote presentation’.

The Future Show Live will have its world premier at Innotribe Sibos! The show starts at 09:30am sharp and flows directly without break into Digital Ethics. Be sure to reserve your seat. No hotel bath-towels allowed.

Digital Ethics

Whereas Gerd’s session will picture in broad brush stroked the tension between technology and humanity, in this session we will do a deep dive into the digital ethics that should underpin this man-machine convergence.

We believe these digital ethics are very relevant for financial services, and have fields of application in analytics, robo-advisors, financial apps, Ethereum DOA fork, chatbots, upto the respect for human attention in the design of non-intrusive applications.

The speakers for this session:

  • John Havens, Executive Director, The Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems
  • Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist, and Fellow at Harvard Berkman Klein Center
  • Aurélie Pols, Data Governance & Privacy Advocate, and advisor to the Ethics Data Group EDPS (European Data Protection Supervisor)

The three  speakers will each take a different angle at the topic. From “value sensitive design”, to the respect of our human attention, into data governance, who sets the norms, how polices them, and how will good ethical behaviour be rewarded, or harmful applications be penalised. This may be a next area for regulation, not only in financial industry.

Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is one of the central challenges of the 21st Century. It demonstrates and strengthen the need to establish ethical standards for Artificial Intelligence to help us preserve the values we cherish the most.

To get yourself prepared for this session, you can start experimenting with The Moral Machine of MIT.

 

 

The session will be immediately followed by book signings by Gerd Leonhard, John Havens and Amber Case

Book gerdAmber bookHavens book

FinTech Hubs session – EMEA – over lunch time

Building upon the success of last year’s session “Why banks need FinTech hubs?”, we wanted to go create more air-time for FinTech Hubs from different regions of the world.

Each hub will get 10 min to share their ambitions and plans. With our designers we are looking how we can make this an engaging experience and avoid having a series of 6 commercials. Like for all FinTech Hub sessions this session is full house.

The “6 from the AMERICAS” are (alphabetical order):

  • 500 Startups
  • Digital Finance Institute and FinTech Association of Canada
  • FinTech Mexico
  • FinTech Forum Germany*
  • MaRS Discovery District
  • Partnership Fund for New York City

We have a waiting list for all FinTech Hubs sessions from most regions. That’s why we added *Germany to this group. They took the last remaining slot;-)

It is interesting to see how some of our sessions (like last year’s FinTech Hub session) or some of our research papers (like last year’s Powerwomen in FinTech) are growing into movements like www.femtechleaders.com or to new initiatives like the Global FinTech Hub Federation (GFHF) announced two weeks ago. See press-release here.

TheGFHF-Branding-Logo-Non-HD

We are happy to announce the GFHF will premier their latest FinTech Hub Index (A benchmark of 20+ FinTech Hubs) at Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Sandwiches and soft drinks will be served in the Innotribe space.

AI for Financial Services

AI for financial services is usually associated with robo-advisors. But AI for financial services also includes pattern recognition software and algorithms to detect fraud patterns and other financial anomalies.

This demo-packed session will showcase examples in fraud detection, cyber security,  compliance, natural language processing for AIFMD reporting (The Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive), and machine learning from customer behaviour for robo-advisory.

The cast of this session:

  • Eric Rosenblum, Executive, Palantir

  • Edouard D’Archimbaud, Head of AI Lab CIB, BNP Paribas Securities Services

  • Lisa Huang, Head of Quantitative Analysis Research, Betterment

This session will be moderated by Nicolas Mackel, CEO of Luxembourg for Finance.

Innovation in cyber-security: Innovative defences to innovative attacks

This session will highlight some of the latest innovative cyber-security attacks, and investigate how to address them with the most innovative defence strategies that mitigate the risks going forward.

We have an absolute rock-star for this session, nobody else than Bruce Schneier!

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by the Economist. He is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

In his usual high-energy style, Bruce will start with a TED-like talk, and the quickly open for an intense audience Q&A.

His latest book “Data and Goliath” (Amazon Affiliate link), is an absolute bestseller.

data and goliath

Clay Shirky said about the book: “Bruce Schneier’s amazing book is the best overview of privacy and security ever written.”

After this session, you’ll never look at cyber-security in the same way again. It is very rare to have the occasion to be face to face with this caliber of security expert, so be there in time!

 

Thingclash

Thingclash is a framework for considering cross-impacts and implications of colliding technologies, systems, cultures and values around the Internet of Things.

We’ll be specifically looking at frictions that emerge in both existing IoT categories with transactional capabilities (such as chip cards and smart watches) and emerging ones (like drones, self-driving cars, and multi-purpose connected buttons). With new IoT interfaces proliferating in banking and financial services, there hasn’t been a better time to examine how we design for transactions in a way that protects usability, privacy, and security.

The session is designed as an interactive card-game, combining things, personas and contexts.

things 2

This workshop will be delivered by

  • Scott Smith, Founder and Principal, Changeist
  • Susan Cox-Smith, Partner & Creative Strategist, Changeist

Changeist is a post-national research, consulting and creative group that helps organisations navigate complex futures.

 

Networking Event

Last year we experimented with an informal networking event for anybody who feels connected to the FinTech ecosystem, and you seemed to have liked it. The Innotribe Networking event is back this year on Wednesday 28 Sep 2016, starting at 7pm in the Salle Communale des Délices – 20 Route de Colovrex, 1218 Le Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland –View Map. This is only a 10 min walk from the Sibos PalExpo conference center.

Agenda

19:00          Event Opens

19:00          Welcome speech by Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director the Linux Foundations Hyperledger Project

19:10          Bar & Buffet Opens, music provided by Beatie Wolfe and her band

IMG_0163

Sponsor

We are delighted that the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project is sponsoring the 2016 Innotribe Networking event

Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project

Partners

2016sponsors

This is an free networking event. Anybody who smells FinTech is welcome, but to help us plan for the catering and drinks, we’d like you to register on our registration site.

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion.

For the sessions where it makes sense, we also have a transversal anchor for Cyber-security and one for DLT. They stay in the Innotribe space for the week, and will report back at the end of the week:

  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven
  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney

Next week, we will cover the themes and sessions of day-3 of Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe,@Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day2 – Modern Organisation

Modern organisation

Three weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I will reveal more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 (29 days left at the time of this writing).

Our preparations are in full swing. We are in the midst of a series of intense prep calls with all speakers, together with our production teams and our facilitators and designers. All engines are on!

It has always been our intention to build a program with architectural integrity and a week of intense learning experiences. This year is no different.

General structure:

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

 

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC.

For the opening session, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and for the Tuesday opening, we will zoom in into some highlights of our Innotribe Startup Africa.

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Given that our day-2 is about the modern organisation, our day anchor is Louise Coster, Head of Human Resources at SWIFT. She will come back in the day closing to wrap up the learning of the day.

In between we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debates so you have the time to enjoy those as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-2 is “The Modern Organization”. In addition of the Opening and Closing sessions, we have three sessions:

  • Organise for complexity
  • FinTech Hubs session – EMEA
  • Situational awareness maps

Organise for complexity

This session is about leadership principles for a high performing modern organisation operating in a highly complex environment and how to deal with both in a productive way.

After a condensed introduction on the theory and practice of organisational high performance, we will move into an interactive discussion on contemporary leadership and profound transformation in organisations of all kinds.

Our speaker will dissect classic management theory and in a well-humored manner, and offer coherent alternatives that are a welcome addition to management thinking and align with the principles of wirearchy and connected leadership.

Pflaeging

 

Some of the session’s learning objectives are:

  • Complicated and complex are different, both exist in work – Complexity means: surprise
  • Every org has three structures, not one; they can be in conflict
  • Orgs are not pyramids, but peaches; Decentralization is a must, not an option in complexity
  • Orgs can move through different phases. Most have transformed at least once! Differentiation is toxic now, due to complexity
  • In order to transform an org, you must fix Human Nature assumptions and rid orgs of outdated practices and method
  • Change is easy if you work the system, not the people! People will adapt
  • We already have the right people, we just force them into the wrong kind of organisational model.

Our  rock-star for this session:

  • Niels Pflaeging, Co-founder and associate of the BetaCode Network

 

I was following Niels’ blog and tweets for quite a while, and when i discovered almost by accident his talk for the Deutsche Telekom leadership in Bonn, 2015, I knew Niels had to become a speaker at Innotribe Sibos.

 

This is a highly interactive session, with assignments for the audience, to help you internalise the knowledge you picked up from our speakers. At the end of the session, there will be a “gift” to take with you.

Niels book

After the session we will have a book signing by Niels of his latest book “Organize for Complexity: How to Get Life Back Into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization” (Amazon Affiliates link)

FinTech Hubs session – EMEA – over lunch time

Building upon the success of last year’s session “Why banks need FinTech hubs?”, we wanted to go create more air-time for FinTech Hubs from different regions of the world.

Each hub will get 10 min to share their ambitions and plans. With our designers we are looking how we can make this an engaging experience and avoid having a series of 6 commercials. Like for all FinTech Hub sessions this session is full house.

The “6 from EMEA” are (alphabetical order):

  • EggSplore
  • Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
  • Holland FinTech
  • ING FinTech Village
  • Innovate Finance
  • Luxembourg for Finance

We have a waiting list for all FinTech Hubs sessions from all regions.

It is interesting so see how some of our sessions (like last year’s FinTech Hub session) or some of our research papers (like last year’s Powerwomen in FinTech) are growing into movements like www.femtechleaders.com or to new initiatives like the Global FinTech Hub Federation (GFHF) announced earlier this week. See press-release here.

TheGFHF-Branding-Logo-Non-HD

 

Sandwiches and soft drinks will be served in the Innotribe space.

Situational awareness maps

In this session you will learn how to avoid creating a “me too” strategy. “me too” strategies sound like “let’s Uberise everything”, “let’s Platform everything”, etc. Most of these strategies are copy-cats of successful models for one company, but rarely apply in other contexts.

It is like playing chess on a linux command line without seeing the chessboard.

What is missing is situational awareness of the battlefield. Both positional and movement awareness of the enemy and the different technologies that each move at their own pace through their maturity cycle.

fig43

This highly interactive exercise will immerse you in the principles of situational awareness mapping, and will help you understand where the different methods like R&D, Agile, Scrum, Lean, and SixSigma each have their role to play.

The man:

  • Simon Wardley, Industry and technology mapper, destroyer of undeserved value, CSC Leading Edge Forum

This session is absolute brainfood with British humor guaranteed. Check him out at his 2015 Oscon talk or spend some quality time on his awesome blog:  http://blog.gardeviance.org/

We have designed also this session as an immersive learning experience, seats and limited, be sure to be there in time and don’t put your beach towel on your chair two hours before the session 😉

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion. The “instigators” of day-2 are:

  • Patrik Havander, Nordea
  • Anthony Brady, BNYM
  • Saket Sharma, BNYM

For the sessions where it makes sense, we also have a transversal anchor for Cyber-security and one for DLT. They stay in the Innotribe space for the week, and will report back at the end of the week:

  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven
  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney

Next week, we will cover the themes and sessions of day-3 of Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe,@Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day1 – Disruption Redefined

Disruption

Two weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I will reveal more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 (37 days left at the time of this writing).

Our preparations are in full swing. We are in the midst of a series of intense prep calls with all speakers, together with our production teams and our facilitators and designers. All engines are on!

It has always been our intention to build a program with architectural integrity and a week of intense learning experiences. This year is no different.

General structure:

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

 

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC

For the opening session, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and for the Monday opening, we will zoom in into some highlights of our Innotribe Industry Challenge on Securities (about issuing a bond on the blockchain).

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Our day-1 anchor is Michell Zappa from Envisioning Tech, Brazil. He will come back in the day closing to wrap up the learning of the day.

In between we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debates so you have the time to enjoy those as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-1 is “disruption re-defined”. We have three sessions:

  • Patterns of disruption in wholesale banking
  • The Future of Money
  • Emerging technologies for financial services

Patterns of disruption in wholesale banking

Learn to anticipate and react to disruptions in Securities, Trade Finance and FX.

Begin 2016, the Deloitte Center for the Edge published a deep research on nine patterns of disruption cross-industry. Upon our request, Deloitte created a special version for Innotribe Sibos on the relevance of these disruption patterns for financial services, and how incumbents can/should react to them.

Patterns of disruption Innotribe slide 042616

Key take-aways of this session will be:

  • Reframe the notion of disruption
  • Understand there are patterns of disruption
  • There is a way to be more rigorous in understanding and anticipating disruption
  • There are some effective ways to respond to disruption in a purposeful way
  • Apply these insights to our world of wholesale banking and think of specific action steps that can be taken by our organisations

The rock-star line-up for this session:

  • John Hagel, Co-Chair, Deloitte Center for the Edge
  • Val Srinivas, Research Leader, Banking & Capital Markets, Center for Financial Services, Deloitte

This is a highly interactive session, with assignments for the audience, to help you internalise the knowledge you picked up from our speakers. At the end of the session, there will be a “gift” to take with you.

The Future of Money

For the first time, this ever-popular Innotribe session has been promoted as a full-blown “Big Issue Debate” in the main plenary room of Sibos.

future of money

The idea behind Future of Money is to essentially act as a crystal ball, examining the large shaping trends that are going to affect financial services in typically two to three year’s time.

Moderated by Udayan Goyal, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Apis Partners and Co-Founder and non-executive director of Anthemis Group, this year’s Future of Money is set to discuss the Internet of Things (IoT) and how the collection of data in our highly networked world through sensor-based technology is set to change how we think of financial services.

Other topics include the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), with decisions regarding investments and creditworthiness becoming the purview of automated systems based entirely on inputs of personalised data.

The line-up:

  • Jon Stein, CEO Betterment
  • Carlos Menendez, President, Enterprise Partnerships, International Markets, Mastercard
  • Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist and Fellow at Harvard Berkman Klein Center

We also tried to re-invent a bit the flow of a big issue debate and “sweat the technical asset” we have at our disposal. Expect more from Innotribe 😉

Emerging technologies for financial services

In this session, we will share the results of a research commissioned by Innotribe to Envisioning Tech from Brazil. Again, original research and a word premiere of a fantastic visualisation tool.

The different technologies will be mapped on different time horizons, and we will highlight the inter-connections between them.

Every technology will come with a navigation card detailing its relevance to the financial services industry around 10 different impact vectors – with a focus on cyber-security and distributed ledger technologies.

visualization fintech

Screenshot of beta-version of visualisation tool

The session is animated with a spectacular screen-wide interactive visualisation.

The session is an interactive workshop with a card-game interaction with the participants. Seats will be limited.

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion. The “instigators” of day-1 are:

  • Patrik Havander, Nordea
  • Anthony Brady, BNYM
  • Matthew Grabois, BNP Paribas Securities Services

For the sessions where it makes sense, we also have a transversal anchor for Cyber-security and one for DLT. They stay in the Innotribe space for the week, and will report back at the end of the week:

  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven
  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney

Next week, we will cover the themes and sessions of day-2 of Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe, @Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Shift Happens: Blockchain to revolutionalise Scientology

scientology

In the aftermath of the Scientology trial in Brussels last month, senior representatives of the six Belgian governments have initiated exploratory talks with Scientology to assess the creation of a blockchain-based venture for the relationship economy.

blockchain

In a joint press release, they announced today the launch of DAG (“Digital Asset Goldings”), a new blockchain consortium headed by Bitalik Vuterin. The project uses a brand new fork of the blockchain protocol called “Ethereal”: a permissioned mutual distributed ledger protocol, underpinned by its own ether-cryptocurrency “Real”.

DAG has been set up as a non-profit cooperative, and has already collected more that 500M USD in equity funding, rocketing it into the first blockchain unicorn in history.

DAG will be governed by G4S (Governance For Securities), a governance body made of 45 major financial institutions, and several of the RegTech sandboxes, that tested the technology in Q1 of 2016.

The funding round was lead by FISH (Flanders International Securities Holdings), fully owned in open source by five of the six Belgian Governments (Brussels does not participate: as the home of the European Union, the Commission does not permit hosting regions to participate in ventures promoting non-fiat currencies).

FISH Logo

Flanders International Securities Holdings holds 51% of the shares of DAG, 29% is owned by G4S, and the remaining 20% is reserved for future crowd sourced citizen participation, based on simple bonds that will be issued in the Real open source currency on the DAG shared ledger.

Ethereal leverages the findings of the Digital Asset Grid project, an incubation project that was set on hold in 2012 by lack of interest and investment, probably because to novel at its time. Digital Asset Goldings will use the same principles of governance, trust, resilience and availability as the DAG-project, but the implementation is based on a brand new revolutionary protocol “Ethereal”, using modern breakthrough encryption technology based on Quasars.

DAG logo

“With Ethereal, we have solved the scalability problem of the blockchain”, says Vuterin; “We can scale to more that 1 Trillion nodes on the grid, and all the atomic transactions can be executed in milliseconds. We can do this thanks to our quantum computer “StockGold”, mining Reals at the nanoscale and nanosecond.”

quantum computer

Quantum Computer running StockGold

Adriano Selinky – Head of BancoVentures, the investment arm of BancoBlanco and one of the 45 banks backing the project – raves: “We believe there are about 20B USD in yearly savings in direct settlement of Scientology fees: the business case was a no brainer for us, and we are eager to invest in more Ethereal-based projects and startups. DAG will revolutionize financial services, and will deeply disrupt the economic fabric of our economies. We see many more use cases, but it will take a couple of years before we will see the full impact of this.”

Adriano Selinky

Adriano Selinky – Head of BancoVentures

The Scientology trials will be labeled “TrustWeb” and will be led by Neil Sinner, as a competitor to his brother’s “DataWeb”. “Kris has been instrumental in setting up DataWeb, but this technology space is moving so fast that DataWeb is already an outdated technology before its first implementation. TrustWeb is just offering superior relationship experiences”

The promise of superior relationship experiences did not go unnoticed to the 6 Belgian Governments, who consider the DAG and the Ethereal G4S governance model ready to revolutionize their own move from centralized to decentralized to fully distributed peer-to-peer government.

DAG will have its international headquarter in Blocke-Heist, a little town on the Belgian coast. The little town is renowned for its elite public, attracted by art galleries, fashion shops, exclusive restaurants and bars, and a vibrant nightlife.

Baron Clipckens – Mayor of Blocke-Heist – was very bullish: “I was myself hit very hard during the 2008 crisis as an investor, and I am convinced that transparency and traceability of financial transactions are the best guarantee for the long- and short term savings of our citizens. We welcome all FinTech Hubs to join us in this effort, and we hope that Blocke-Heist can become the Blocke-Valley and Davos of the Relationship Economy.”

Together with Scientology, DAG has also acquired its HQ real estate in Blocke-Heist: “La Réserve”, a 3-star Michelin restaurant and conference center.

La Reserve Blocke-Heist

La Réserve in Blocke-Heist, Flanders, Belgium

It comes with an 18 Hole Golf course to facilitate high quality relationships and connections. Close to the seaside, this will guarantee DAG with a daily fresh supply of fish and seafood, and is ideally positioned as a high-end executive meeting and event center.

DAG also attracted @petervan (one of the Co-Founders of Innotribe) as their Artistic Director. “There is indeed room to rethink the way events are organized, using more participatory Ethereal concepts that will guarantee advanced collaborative learning beyond the pure cognitive. La Réserve is an outstanding location where physical and emotional space blend into unique immersive experiences”; said Petervan.

Petervan Shift Happens

@petervan, in his black T-Shirt “SHIFT HAPPENS”, at Innotribe Sibos last year
(black T-Shirts seem to be the standard uniform of Innotribe Co-Founders)

DAG seems to be a marriage in heaven and possibly the singularity moment for financial services: the future of decentralized governance combined with the relationship economy of Scientology.

Casino Blocke Heist

Blocke-Heist Casino – Magritte Biennale

The DAG opening gala party – Tuxedo and Magritte Bowler Hat only for men, ladies in Gala Dress – will be held tonight in the Grand Salon of the Casino of Blocke-Heist, starting at 11pm with Champagne and genuine Russian caviar, followed by a standing dinner, and Belgian Top House-DJ’s animating the dance floor till early in the morning. The event is sponsored by Veuve Wickcot Champagnes and BancoBlanco. For those with more artistic interests, there is also a Biennale running in the Casino, of Belgian surrealist artist Magritte. See you all there!

How to avoid simplistic conversations on disruption?

This post is about some of the myopic views on disruption in financial services (or any other vertical for that argument), and why I am getting a bit tired of FinTech, RegTech, InsurTech, or whatever AbcTech you may come up with.

Petervan Abstrakt Motiv 390a detail b+

Disrupted - Petervan Artwork - Acryl on Paper format A1

 

Most of the discussions in FinTech are about the (by now outdated) “unbundling” of highly vertical integrated organizations like banks. Everybody recalls the famous CB-Insight slides on how all functions on the website of HSBC, Wells Fargo, or fill in your <Bank Name> here, will be replaced by better offerings of startups or scale-ups: “everything gets fragmented”, you know 😉

It even leads to a “Re-bundling” of financial services, as what was once unbundled needs now to be re-bundled by “banking-as-a-platform” or “Fintegration”, just to throw another buzzword into the mix.

This is in my opinion a highly simplistic view on disruption. It is a fragmented view on disruption. The disruption view is fragmented: each little function on its own is subject of a fragmented disruption debate. We are missing the holistic view of what is going on.

What I would like to bring into the conversation is the “inter-connectedness” of everything, or the “entanglement” of everything.

For payments, the conversation is usually about how many and which intermediaries are part of a payment transaction from the payer to the payee, and how they add value, friction and costs into the system: one can indeed draw disintermediation maps and articulate how the different new entrants attack the different pieces of the end-to-end transaction. But it is piecemealed view, as if the sum of the atomic transactions is an exact equation of the value created in those ecosystem value chains.

The same reflections can be made on the securities business, where many different players (exchanges, central counterparties (CCPs), central securities depositories (CSDs), brokers, custodians and investment managers) are part of the end-to-end flow of atomic transactions between the issuer of a security and the consumer of that security. See also recent comprehensive post by Let’s Talk Payments.

The point I am trying to make here is that what needs to be solved, re-thought and re-designed is a deep ecosystem entanglement. What are really needed are a fundamental process redesign and process innovation and that is not an easy undertaking with all the network effects that are inherent in these ecosystems.

The other point I am trying to make is nobody – not the incumbents, nor the startups/scale-ups – is in a position to solve this on their own.

I believe we have to evolve from platform capitalism to platform cooperation or even platform co-operativism.

  • Instead of talking about optimized correspondent banking, the conversation should be one of collaborative/cooperative banking.
  • Instead of talking about optimized securities lifecycles and settlement, the conversation should be one of collaborative/cooperative securities markets.

The system is not broken. It works very well for what it was designed for. It does not need to be fixed. It needs to be re-thought. What we are witnessing is the need for a fundamental re-thinking of our assumptions. The financial system is part of a broader system of capitalism based on neoliberalism. That system is broken.

Paul Mason – who wrote the book “Post-Capitalism” – was very clear in his recent keynote to the Glasgow Economic Forum: “Neoliberalism is broken”. And he goes on:

  • information technology has paralysed capitalism’s capacity to adapt
  • information technology creates a short-cut to abundance
  • the root cause of the boom-bust cycles, collapsing productivity, stagnation and policy paralysis is that the markets are sending us a signal that there’s not enough value in a high-tech economy to justify current valuations — of debt, equities or derivatives
  • we are in a long transition beyond capitalism, in which the state, the market and a non-market sector based on collaborative production will jostle and coexist
  • and that the only theory that can encompass all of these facts is the one originated by the man quoted on the poster behind me [Adam Smith] — a modernised form of the labour theory of value.

That is the first simplification in the current mainstream thinking about disruption.

As a start, one should start looking at the symptoms of that broken system (as very well articulated in Otto Scharmer’s work at the MIT U.Lab). These symptoms are:

  • An Ecological divide
  • A Social divide
  • A Spiritual divide

otto

The second simplification of the disruption discourse is the lack of inclusion of the macro-forces. Some of the macro-forces deeply driving what’s going on are:

  • Technology macro-force. Here is where inter-connectedness hits hardest. However, this is probably the easiest macro-force to deal with, as technology will take care of itself, as it always has. Open source and other collaborative models will only speed-up that self-care of technology: standards will emerge almost naturally, by natural selection, or my monopolistic interventions.
  • Regulatory macro-force. Regulation is still very high on the agenda of financial institutions, and one can only expect that more is to come, especially on the area of data capitalism, handling of personal and corporate data, and even data ethics. After having digested the regulatory impact of the 2008 financial crisis, many are tempted and seduced to jump back with relief into innovation. The blockchain hype is a great excuse for claiming one is busy with the future state of things. Nothing could be further from the truth
  • Geo-political macro-force: Grexit, Brexit, Terrorism, War, Surveillance, climate, and other crisis that can pop-up at any moment in time, with their potential of killing overnight all the innovation plans and ambitions.
  • Eco macro-force: the acknowledgement that our organizations don’t operate in isolation, that we have to evolve from ego-businesses to eco-businesses, not only extracting value out of the ecosystem for our sole and own benefit, but that we are part of a reciprocal non-zero-sum game with an unspoken desire to save humanity.

The third simplification is the omission of the time component of evolution. I strongly recommend you discovering the work of Simon Wardley and his “situational awareness maps”.

 

 

Different values are created by different versions of different technologies and value engines, each of them evolving at their own pace on the lifecycle of emerging to commodity/utility. For big organizations – like financial institutions – it is extremely difficult to map out the current state, let’s not even mention the ability to strategically decide where one wants to head for in different time horizons in the future.

The same situational awareness is not only needed for (existing) and new technologies, but also for existing and new regulations, geo- and eco- events and ambitions.

In the past many have been concerned with the “backward compatibility” of new services and solutions. Backwards compatibility with the existing footprint and practices in the market that is.

I believe there is room today to start thinking in terms of “Forward Compatibility”.

What is Forward Compatibility? It is a capability to plan ahead for gradual adoption by the ecosystem, taking into account the different barriers mentioned above. This is about knowing HOW to get at the new destination:

  • How you rally the main stakeholders of the ecosystem into a rigorous system and process innovation? Process innovation is different from process-, datamodel-, or messaging standardization. It is not about standardizing the existing and guaranteeing backwards compatibility with the existing. It is about co-creating a new reality.
  • How you promote the evolution from the current model to the future model? In the case of distributed ledger technologies for example, it is not about a tabula rasa that will eradicate the existing, but how one evolves from for example a messaging hub-and-spoke paradigm towards business objects and lifecycles in the cloud, initially probably in one central database (one node), and then evolve to a peer-to-peer networks of many distributed databases or nodes (remember the Digital Asset Grid?)
  • How to bootstrap this new reality taking into account the network effects to be created and promoted in the new P2P reality.

No disruption will happen without fundamental re-design – or better re-invention – of the end-to-end business processes:

  • Organizations knowing where they want to get and defining and leading that journey;
  • De-risking change throughout this journey;
  • Making trade-offs in the breadth ànd depth of the destination;
  • Moving beyond the atomic nature of the transaction. As mentioned an nausea in previous posts, it is not good enough anymore to enable (atomic) transactions, the challenge is to enable commerce, as an end-to-end process

Startups/Scale-ups who want to be part of this endeavor, will need to know how to “scale”: they will need to learn to appreciate the mechanics of growing a startup into a corporate. This growth process (and its associated growth pains) is very well described in the post “Go Corporate or go home” around the concept of legibility of on organization. The startup organizations – whether they like it or not – will need to become more legible, more predictable. The author makes a very solid argument why hierarchies are needed.

“The smaller a company is, the less they need to formalize anything, and the less the three levels — chain of command, business process, and culture — differ.”

 As they grow, they will have to synchronize how they transform these three levels (chain of command, business process, and culture). It’s not only from small self-sufficient team into hierarchies; it is also growing into professional business processes, and evolving the social fabric and conventions.

Although startups, scale-ups, and corporate innovation sandboxes mimicking the startup culture “love to have and keep the flexibility, the cost of growth is scale, integration, and profitability.”

In this context, it is probably worth having a look at the post about the Transferwise culture (I could have taken any other scale-up for that matter) “We inspire smart people and we trust them”, and especially the comment on that post that talks about KPIs, product-level empowerment, about focusing on growth more holistically, actually removing bottlenecks and silos, empowering teams at the product level, and instrumenting themselves to be able to actually get granular feedback.

If possible – assuming you want to spend some quality time – read that post and comment after you have read “Go corporate of go home”.

So next time, when you pitch about disruption, about the end of banks/banking, about collaboration/co-operation, or about any other technology solving world hunger, please make sure you have an answer on how to get to your new destination. I would suggest you keep forward compatibility in mind.

Platform Capitalism or Platform Cooperativism

Douglas

Headshot - Douglas Rushkoff

The first time I heard the term “Platform Cooperativism” was when listening to a talk by Douglas Rushkoff (www.rushkoff.com) on 15 Nov 2015 at the Internet Society.

video

Just a couple of weeks before, Doug had sent me a manuscript version of his new upcoming book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth became the enemy of prosperity” (Amazon Associates link), planned for release in two weeks or so. I recall the working title of the book was “The end of growth”.

book

As usual – when listening to an interesting talk – I scribble notes on my notepad, pausing the video after every interesting sentence, and end up with some sort of transcript, somewhat personalized because using my own sense-making lens and bias.

Some snapshots:

  • Before the law enforced monopoly, now technology enforces monopoly
  • From creative destruction to destructive destruction
  • A software company is a company extracting value from the working economy (transactions between people) and converts it into capital (static bags of shares and stock prices), converting land and labor into capital.
  • Creating real value, that’s the suckers’ place (of being gamed). Playing the game is the place where you want to be
  • Central currency is the embedded operating system
  • Should we optimize for growth or optimize for humans?
  • Jobs!, Jobs!, Jobs! Let’s pretend we are on acid for a minute ;-). Who really wants a “job”?
  • Most companies, after reaching max growth, go for steady state, the flow of money
  • Uber drivers are doing R&D for automatic cars. They don’t have a platform cooperative
  • Family businesses are focused on the long term, are generational, are even willing to help other create value.
  • From a growth model of business to a flow model of business
  • Optimize for the velocity of money (not for being static, stocked in troves)
  • We don’t need banks to authenticate
  • The bank was made to extract value out of our transactions
  • About Bitcoin/Blockchain (at minute 37): “what are they programming for?” Bitcoin creates trust? No, Bitcoin SUBSTITUTES trust
  • In the end, we have to re-program the social expectations of each other
  • There is some chance that the P2P economy may happen, that the extraction economy comes to its end, with interesting experiments
    • We see hybrid models to fund pizzeria, 50% Crowd, 50% bank
    • The bank as facilitator of local community development
  • From platform monopolies to platform cooperatives
  • Facilitating exchange of value between people instead of extracting value from people’s labor.
  • We need a full-blown renaissance, and we are in it…
    • From Perspective painting to the hologram and the fractal
    • From the individual hero to collectivism
    • From the printing press to the computer
    • From enclosing the commons to retrieving the commons
    • From divisional science to the science of whole-ism
  • Land, Labor, and Capital as PARTNERS in an economy
    • Today, capital is extracting from Land and Labor

The comments right after Douglas’ talk by Astra Taylor, author of the book: “The Peoples’ Platform: And Other Digital Dilusions” are interesting:

  • I want (platform) cooperatism to be confrontational, it has to make a difference in the world
  • How different is the current moment? If different at all….
  • The key for cooperatives success is access to capital

Platform Cooperativism is possibly an answer to Platform Capitalism. Harold Jarche recently articulated very well what platform capitalism is really about: the extraction of value from many for the benefit of a few.

“The emerging economy of platform capitalism includes companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. These giants combined do not employ as many people as General Motors did. But the money accrued by them is enormous and remains in a few hands.”

And just a couple of days ago, David Bollier had a great post pointing to a new report on Platform Cooperativism by Trebor Scholz, one of the organizers of the Nov 2015 conference where Rushkoff spoke. Full report (PDF) report here.

“In the report, Scholz notes that the gig economy financializes resources that were previously outside of the market.  Our cars, our apartments, our private time – all can now be monetized through corporate platforms and made subordinate to market forces.  In effect, this new system is “embedding extractive processes into social interactions” and “extending the deregulated free market into previously private areas of our lives,” writes Scholz.”

Platform Cooperativism is a choice we have in the Industrial-Human Paradox. The WEF makes a lot of noise about “The 4th Industrial Revolution”, semi celebrating forms platform capitalism like the Uberization of everything, and robots eating our jobs.

It feels to me that sort of thinking starts feeling more as entertainment rather than independent thinking and provocation.

As Douglas Rushkoff said and provoked elsewhere: we don’t need to fix the system. The system just works fine for what it was designed for: extracting value.

scharmer

Otto Scharmer articulated very well the symptoms of the broken system:

  • Ecological divide
  • Social divide
  • Spiritual divide

We don’t need to fix the existing system, we need another system. We need radical ideas for the new century: platform cooperatism could be the answer. But a lot needs to change.

Still inspired by Scharmer, we need to improve the quality of how we engage with each other, the way we debate, dialogue, coordinate, organize. We need to take into account the quality of the context. We need to go from experiments and prototypes to models that can scale and be transformative. And that needs to happen at an institutional level.

In his ULabs, Otto Scharmer has identified two missing conditions for this to happen:

  • Enabling infrastructures that bring together the right set of players into a system
  • Move from abstract coordination mechanisms (like hierarchy, markets or organized interest groups) to co-creating ecosystems

In the middle of the great transition from centralized to decentralized to fully distributed systems, we have a choice: we can copycat the models of platform capitalism leading almost by nature to a few monopolists who take it all, or we can choose for a construct that has in mind the flourishing of the whole, of the cooperative.

Somebody has to take up the role of the commons for financial services, where the end-goal is not to maximize profit and shareholders value, but the interest of the community and the maximalisation of flow between all the stakeholders.