Tag: innotribe

Innotribe Sibos 2015 – Day four: What machine intelligence wants

This is the last post in a series of four about the Innotribe Sibos 2015 programme.

In a play of words on Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants”, we have four major themes this year, one theme per day:

Sibos_visual_day4

Day-4 is all about Machine Intelligence. We will showcase highly immersive demonstrations of cognitive analytics for a real-time world. The day will include sufficient critical voices on the impact of machine intelligence on the future of jobs and human / machine interaction.

Our anchor-person for the day is our own Jay van Zyl, Founder & CEO, Innosect.

jay-head

Jay is all about Social Based Innovation: unlocking value in the social ecosystem requires a renewed look at how machine and human interact. He is involved with ground-breaking work in Silicon Valley, for example the Innovation for Jobs community lead by David Nordfors and Vint Cerf. His latest book “Built to Thrive, making your mark in a connected world” was published in 2011 focuses on the social aspects of innovation.

Usually, by day-4 of Sibos, folks get a bit tired, so we thought opening this day with something really cool. Starting at 09:15am – 10:00am on the Innotribe stand, our session “Accelerating and scaling expertise with cognitive computing from IBM Research and Watson” will showcase these new promising technologies in 360°! We will use the full real estate of our big LED wall to immerse you in mind-blowing demos of cognitive assistants, a financial sentiment aggregator, psycholinguistic features, and deep learning techniques. And yes, we will have the IBM Watson robot.

Video IBM Watson Engagement Advisor – check out robot at 1 min

After a short break, we’ll continue on the Innotribe stand at 10:15am – 11:15am with the “Voice of the customer 3.0”. In the old days, organisations tried to understand the voice of their customers through so-called customer focus groups. We have evolved a lot since then. In this session we’ll show you three examples of the 2.0 and 3.0 generations:

  • Fidor Bank operates a highly participatory platform for customer and developer engagement in almost real-time
  • Better Ventures will showcase how creating participatory experiences and at scale is now within reach of any financial institution.
  • Innosect looks at the intersection of innovation and human capacity as our work on the idea-graph seeks to create the ultimate human-idea network.

The Innosect piece is a nice segway in to the next session at 12:45pm – 13:45pm, Innotribe stand “Thinking machines and jobs: How banks can respond to the opportunity”.

robot pepper

You will be welcomed by Pepper, the Aldebaran robot

Will robots steal your job? Check out this site from BBC news, to assess the likelihood that your job could be automated within the next two decades. But it is probably the wrong question. It’s a question grounded in a faltering narrative of a task-centered economy. We can do better.

That’s why we have invited David Nordfors, CEO and Co-Chair, i4J Innovation for Jobs who together with his partner Vint Cerf at Google are already thinking about the next stage: “If computers are going to do what people do today, what can people do?

We will quickly change the dystopian “robots will kill our jobs” conversation into a “disrupting unemployment” perspective and weave in the views of Millennials from Wharton FinTech and the Singapore Management University.

At 14:00pm – 15:00pm, we’ll get a little more relaxed with a session labelled “Analytics for a real-time world” on the Innotribe stand.

nirvana

Nevermind, we wanted to create a real demo nirvana, and have invited four data analytics and machine intelligence firms who will give amazing demos of applications that are currently in the market related to real-time financial services. I have seen some of the demos and how we are planning to stage this with the full real estate of our circular big LED wall, and this is something you don’t want to miss.

The Innotribe Sibos week comes to an end on the Innotribe stand with our closing session “Machines are not the answer”, starting at 15:15pm. We are very proud to have with us Andrew Keen, Author of “The Internet Is Not The Answer”.

internet not the answer

There are many positive ways in which the Internet has contributed to the world, but as a society we are less aware of its deeply negative effects on our psychology, economy, and culture. Andrew Keen will debunk some of the enthusiasm surrounding what we take for granted in our on-line lives, and reflect on all that artificial and machine intelligence we have seen on this day-4 of Innotribe Sibos 2015.

Right after the Innotribe closing session, we all head for the big Sibos Closing plenary, with Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). And later in the evening you are all invited to join the annual big Sibos party.

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We hope you enjoyed this little series of posts familiarizing you with the Innotribe programme for this year.

We look forward welcoming you on-site and to see you part of our immersive learning experiences on platforms, society, innovation, and machine intelligence.

Other resources:

Innotribe Sibos 2015 – Day three: What innovation wants

Each day the Innotribe programme will focus on a specific theme, throughout which both Millennials and Power Women in FinTech will play an important role participating in all sessions. Last week, we already gave an overview of day-1 and day-2 of this year’s programme. This week, we will cover what happens on Wednesday and Thursday 14-15 October 2015.

In a play of words on Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants”, we have four major themes this year, one theme per day:

Sibos_visual_day3

Day-3 is organized around the Innotribe Startup Challenge Finale. It will be preceded by a highly interactive session with seven FinTech Hubs.

Our anchor-person for the day is our own Kevin Johnson, Innotribe’s Startup Challenge Manager.

During our Innotribe day opening on the Innotribe stand (from 09:15am – 10:00am), we’ll share some of our current and future Innotribe plans in a conversational format: we are happy to announce that our CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt will be part of this session.

We’ll continue at 12:45pm on the Innotribe stand with the session “Why banks need FinTech hubs”. The plan is to understand the offerings and approaches of FinTech Hubs in different regions of the world, and how we can learn from each other and collaborate across cities, countries and regions. We’ll have some good infographics to compare, and a playful “show me your best card” gamification element as well.

We have an impressive line-up for this session that will be moderated by Bernard Lunn, Founding Partner, Daily Fintech Advisers:

The Innotribe Startup Challenge Finale will take place on 14 October from 14:00 till 17:00. Given its success in previous years, we move to a bigger room: Conference Room 2 has a capacity of about 350 people, and we hope we’ll be standing room again, also in this big room.

This year over 370 companies applied to the Startup Challenge, with 60 companies selected to enter the programme. During four regional showcases in London, Cape Town, Singapore and New York, these companies presented their business ideas to an audience of more than 800 industry experts, VCs, representatives from leading financial institutions, and bank decision-makers who selected the 20 finalists – 12 early-stage and 8 growth-stage companies – advancing to the Finale at Sibos.

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Please click here to access all details about the 20 finalists who advance to the Finale at Sibos.

As in previous years, the 12 early-stage finalists will pitch and showcase their business ideas to Sibos delegates who will select this year’s winner. A cash prize of USD 50,000 will be awarded to the winning early-stage finalist. For the first time this year, the remaining eight growth-stage finalists will host individual exhibition booths on the Innotribe stand at Sibos and have the opportunity to give live product demos to Sibos delegates throughout the week. They will be joined by some Startup Challenge alumni: EssDOCS, AMP Credit Technologies and Matchmove.

The Innotribe Startup Finale is open to all Sibos participants and is sponsored by Deutsche Bank, HP, IBM, Invest NI, Level30, Luxembourg for Finance, and Wells Fargo.

Following right after the Innotribe Startup Challenge Finale, we will announce this year’s winner around 17:00 in the foyer area close to Conference Room 2. The winner will receive their cheque of USD 50,000 out of the hands of Christian Sarafidis, SWIFT’s Chief Marketing Officer. A reception will give you the opportunity to network with the various companies who were selected as finalists and congratulate this year winner.

And on Wednesday evening we’ll mix even further with the vibrant local FinTech scene of Singapore for a Networking Event in town.

BASH-inside

250 invitees will have the chance to network at BASH, the new startup hub in Singapore, for a joint event organised by Innotribe and the following Singapore’s FinTech communities.

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This FinTech Meet-up is kindly sponsored by Wells Fargo and Standard Chartered Bank.

Networking-event-sponsors

Register for the FinTech Meet-Up via this link. Innotribe Sibos attendees will get an invitation card on-site. Busses will pick you up at the conference centre to drive you to BASH (and bring you back).

Don’t stay too late, as the morning after, we will be back on the Innotribe stand at 09:15am for an awesome session on machine intelligence with IBM Research and IBM Watson 😉

Sibos_Linkedin

In the coming days, we will familiarize you further with the program for the last day that will be all about Machine Intelligence and the participatory economy in financial services.

Hope you will find ample time to join us in these immersive learning experiences.

Other resources:

Innotribe Sibos 2015 – Day two: What society wants

Each day the Innotribe programme will focus on a specific theme, throughout which both Millennials and Power Women in Fintech will play an important role participating in all sessions. In the next two weeks, we will produce a more detailed blog per theme of each day.

In a play of words on Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants”, we have four major themes this year, one theme per day:

Sibos_visual_day2

Day-2 is about what society wants from financial institutions, covering topics from Millennials who are born digital and mobile, to refugees who are forced to be on the move and have no access to financial services, and financial inclusion for the 2.5 billion unbanked people. These issues will be intersected with a ‘what if’ session on re-inventing regulation for the digital era.

akhtar

Our anchor-person for the day is Akhtar Badshah, PhD, Chief Catalyst, at the Catalytic Innovators Group. Akhtar will be with us the whole day, and will wrap up the findings of this society day. He is also an active speaker in some of the sessions. I met Akhtar at a Giving-conference in Minneapolis earlier this year, and besides the fact he has been Senior Director, Citizenship and Public Affairs, Head Corporate Philanthropy at Microsoft, Akhtar is also an artist and architect, and a wonderful and deep person to engage with.

Akhtar artwork

Artwork by Akhtar Badshah – Untitled - Acrylic on Canvas - 36"x48"

We have prepared and designed six sessions for you on Tuesday, including our Innotribe day opening at 09:15am in the Innotribe Space.

After our Innotribe day opening, we’ll kick off at 10:15am with a session about digital natives. During the session “Engaging with the millennial generation – A hands-on workshop for banks”, Claro Partners and Anthemis Group will share the key insights of research done with a consortium of financial institutions in six markets. The session will also feature key tenets of a whitepaper (PDF link) produced by Millennials from Wharton Fintech in collaboration with Innotribe. The circle will be powered by Millennials from Wharton FinTech and students from the Singapore Management University.

After the Big Issue Debate at 11:30am, we’ll continue at 12:45am in the Innotribe space on Financial Inclusion. Kosta Peric, Deputy Director, Financial Services for the Poor, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will continue the conversation that was started by Bill Gates during the closing plenary at Sibos Boston 2014.

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Video 1 Level One Project overview

Kosta will describe his work with the Level One Project and articulate the opportunity for banks to engage in financial inclusion, not as a CSR or philanthropic project, but as a very scalable business. He will be followed by Udayal Goyal, who will illustrate his work with Apis Partners, a catalyst capital for Financial Services in Growth Markets aiming to have a net positive impact in the communities they invest in. The session is set up as fully interactive session with audience polling, audience exercises and a call for action.

Just stay on the Innotribe stand for the next session about Re-Inventing Regulation starting at 14:00pm sharp. Risk and innovation don’t always go well together. Imagine what regulation would look like if we could start from scratch? Most of our regulatory frameworks are based on industrial era models. What if we could re-design regulation based on digital era models, and how would that inform our conversations with the regulators today. The three igniters from Anthemis Group, Silicon Valley Bank and Transferwise will plant some provocative seeds that will grow like trees on the big LED wall, and lead you into a conversation about the key tenets of a re-invented regulation landscape. We have powered our “circle” with thought leaders on regulation from leading institutions and new entrants. Again, a fully designed and facilitated session with audience exercises.

At 15:15pm, we have made our circular workshop space available to the team lead by Jesse McWaters from the WEF (World Economic Forum) Project on Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services: in 2015 the team explored the drivers and potential implications of innovation across core function of financial services. This invitation-only session will also give feedback on regulatory models for innovation, applications of decentralized systems, blueprint for digital identity, and the impact on society at large.

WEF poster

Graphic from WEF report on Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services.

Where we started the day with Millennials who are born digital and mobile, we will close the day with a session about refugees: people who are forced to be on the move and have no access to financial services.

The session “Leveraging modern payment platforms for accelerating social impact” (starting at 16:30pm on the Innotribe Stand) will be lead by Christine Duhaime and Sam Maule, who started The Banking and Refugees Project to address financial exclusion for refugee populations by devising or applying financial technology for refugee situations. They will be joined by Akhtar Badshah, Kosta Peric, and Daniel Marovitz as instigators in this interactive session with audience exercise.

UN VR film poster

Image: The United Nations has collaborated with filmmaker Chris Milk to make its 
first virtual reality film

The session will include the United Nations virtual reality film Clouds Over Sidra bringing viewers closer to the Syrian conflict by transporting them into the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan – currently home to 84,000 refugees. The session is about refugee crisis in general, not zooming in on any particular region or population. We hope we can challenge you to become part of the solution of this pressing world problem.

refugees VR

Check-out this TED talk video with Chris Milk at minute 7 and imagine how this 
could work on our LED Wall.

In the coming days and weeks, we will familiarize you with the program for the remaining two days. We believe we have a fantastic line-up of speakers, igniters, instigators, contrarians, Millennials and Powerwomen in FinTech.

Hope you will find ample time to join us in these immersive learning experiences.

Other resources:

Innotribe Sibos 2015 – Day One: What platforms want

Each day the Innotribe programme will focus on a specific theme, throughout which both Millennials and Power Women in Fintech will play an important role participating in all sessions. In the next two weeks, we will produce a more detailed blog per theme of each day.

In a play of words on Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants”, we have four major themes this year, one theme per day:

  • Day-1: What Platforms Want
  • Day-2: What Society Wants
  • Day-3: What Innovation Wants
  • Day-4: What Machine Intelligence Wants

Sibos_visual_day1

Platform economics and business models are foundational capabilities for innovation. All the Innotribe sessions on Monday have a specific focus on Platforms.

Our anchor-person for the day is Christopher Wasden, Executive Director at the Sorenson Center for Discovery & Innovation at the University of Utah. Chris will be with us the whole day, and will wrap up the findings of day-1 the following day. He is also an active speaker in some of the sessions.

We have prepared and designed six sessions for you on Monday, including our Innotribe week opening at 09:15am in the Innotribe Space.

After our Innotribe week opening, we’ll kick off at 10:15am with a fascinating “New kids on the block(chain) platform” session, moderated by Mark Buitenhek, Global Head of Transaction Services, ING, and also member of the SWIFT Board. We have invited four newcomers from the blockchain and distributed ledger space: Chain.com, Stellar.org, Standard Treasury (recently acquired by Silicon Valley Bank), and Hyperledger (recently acquired by Digital Asset Holdings). They will engage in a highly interactive debate with four financial institutions (UBS, Barclays, DBS Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon) on the relevancy of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for the financial industry. This is the first session where we will use our magic LED wall on the Innotribe Stand, next to the main SWIFT Stand.

We’ll then move to Conference Room 2 at 11:30am for the “Future of Money” session, for several years now a standing room only session. This session will focus on disruption at large in the financial industry, looking at how the front end is influencing the back end. The underlying theme is to show the front end is fragmenting, whereas the back end is converging. We will use automated credit as the use case for this conversation. The session format promises to be exciting and entertaining: we will position some newcomers in the area of automated credit on the main (front) stage, and facilitate a lively conversation with some major financial institutions in the back-end of the room. With two moderators, camera interaction, audience voting and a mix of Millennials and Powerwomen in FinTech, this promises to be one of the highlights of Innotribe 2015.

Back then to the Innotribe Stand at 12:45pm for “Platform disruption: The business of APIs”. The key immersive learning experience we’d like to create is that the business of API’s is an ecosystem play: with financial institutions wishing to expose or consume functionality through APIs, API gateway providers, developers, applications, and customers using the functionality delivered through those applications. The igniters for this conversation come from Fidor Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, Bank of New York Mellon, and Level39. Moderated by Jurgen Ingels, Founder of Clear2Pay, and Co- Founder / managing partner of SmartFinCapital.

After the big Sibos opening plenary session, we’ll reconvene in the Innotribe Space at 15:15pm for “Killer platforms: The Chinese road to platform disruption”. This session really is about big Chinese tech companies, carving out their platform space in the financial industry (Alibaba, TenCent, Baudu, etc.) and how this will dramatically change the way we think about disruption in FinTech. Through disruptive analysis and primary market research, Kapronasia, The Disruption House and Daily Fintech will present a detailed look at the history of China’s financial industry, the models behind the extraordinary growth of technology companies as financial players and the impact of regulation and reform the most likely path for the industry going forward. Attendees will walk away with a qualitative and quantitative understanding of how China’s tech companies will affect both China and the rest of the world. We’ll use again in a big way our LED Wall to pencil on the world map the relevancy of all this on the different regions.

We will close the day with “Exploring real world disruption scenarios” (starting at 16:30pm on the Innotribe Stand, on how platform strategies help you respond to new entrants in the ever-changing payment landscape. In this session, we will share some of the key findings of a specialised 2015 Innotribe Task Force on platform thinking. We will first familiarize the audience with some of the key drivers of disruption and the “why” of innovation strategies leading into strategic options. Our facilitators have created an engaging hands-on exercise for the audience to familiarize them selves with “disruption scenarios”. We will land with a contextualization of platform strategies on our LED Wall, leveraging the findings of the previous sessions of day one of Innotribe at Sibos 2015.

Sibos_Linkedin

In the coming days and weeks, we will familiarize you with the program for the remaining three days. We believe we have a fantastic line-up of speakers, igniters, instigators, contrarians, Millennials and Powerwomen in FinTech.

Hope you will find ample time to join us in these immersive learning experiences.

Other resources:

Innotribe goes centre stage at Sibos 2015

Exactly one month from the start of Innotribe@Sibos 2015, we issued a press release about our program. It is the kick-off of our campaign for our 7th edition of a four-day FinTech immersive learning experience.

singapore-networking-event-page

This year, Sibos is taking place at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, from 12-15 October.

“Innotribe is not about pitching anything in particular, but rather trying to take a helicopter view of what we see at the edge of our ecosystem – things we believe have the potential to enter the mainstream in three to five years time”

As I already mentioned in our July inaugural post, our tagline this year is “the right mix”.

Sibos_visual_alldays

Each day the Innotribe programme will focus on a specific theme, throughout which both Millennials and Power Women in Fintech will play an important role participating in all sessions. In the next two weeks, we will produce a more detailed blog per theme of each day. The daily themes are as follows:

  • Monday – what platforms want: Platform economics and business models are foundational capabilities for innovation. Throughout the day, we will cover a wide range of topics from distributed ledger technologies, automated credit, API community strategies, the rapidly changing financial industry in China and its global impact, and real world disruption scenarios.
  • Tuesday – what society wants: The platform theme continues, covering topics from Millennials who are born digital and mobile, to refugees who are forced to be on the move and have no access to financial services, and financial inclusion for the 2.5 billion unbanked people. These issues will be intersected with a ‘what if’ session on re-inventing regulation for the digital era.
  • Wednesday – what innovation wants: The highlight of the day is the Innotribe Startup Challenge Finale. It will be preceded by a session on novel ways of progressing innovation throughput, and a highly interactive session with seven FinTech Hubs.
  • Thursday – what machine intelligence wants: Thursday will showcase highly immersive demonstrations of cognitive analytics (e.g. analytical strategies to help derive insights from big data and improve decision making) for a real-time world. The day will include sufficient critical voices on the impact of machine intelligence on the future of jobs and human / machine interaction.

We ensured diversity across the different thought-leaders joining us throughout the week. The notable list of 70+ experts, men, women, Millennials, investors, accelerators and contrarians who will join us throughout the week includes:

  • Akhtar Badshah, PhD, Chief Catalyst, Catalytic Innovators Group
  • Mark Buitenhek, Global Head of Transaction Services, ING
  • Claire Calmejane, Director of Innovation, Lloyds Banking Group
  • Neal Cross, Chief Innovation Officer, DBS Bank
  • Christine Duhaime, Founder, Digital Finance Institute
  • Leda Glyptis, Head of EMEA Innovation Centre, Bank of New York Mellon
  • Matthias Kroener, Co-Founder, Shareholder and CEO, Fidor Bank
  • Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
  • Dr. David Nordfors, CEO and Co-Chair, i4j (Innovation for Jobs)
  • Anju Patwardhan, Group Chief Innovation Officer, Standard Chartered Bank
  • Scarlett Sieber, Senior Vice President, Open Innovation and Ecosystem Builder, BBVA

Activities will be centred on the Innotribe Stand (A20), directly adjacent to the SWIFT stand (A50) on the Exhibition floor. This innovation hub will host a circular workshop room, where the majority of sessions will take place. Given the success of previous years, the session “The Future of Money” and the Innotribe Startup Challenge Finale will move to the biggest main conference room, Conference Room 2. We will see 12 early-stage finalists pitch and showcase their business ideas to Sibos delegates who will select this year’s winner.

All together, it’s becoming quite a big production that starts feeling more and more like a non-stop four-day late night television show. We use professional facilitators to engage the “circle” and the audience, and inject sound and light landscapes with our fantastic new 2,5 meter high LED Wall running all around the workshop space. With a big thanks to our partners Georges P. Johnson and Collective Next.

“We are not in the events business, that we are in the business of creating high quality feedback loops to enable immersive learning experiences”

The Innotribe Stand is also designed to welcome delegates in a networking area and offer them the opportunity to visit the exhibition booths of the growth-stage finalists from this year Startup Challenge and some of Innotribe’s Alumni who will be giving live product demos.

As in 2014, the event will also include a number of book signings.

And on Wednesday evening we’ll mix even further with the vibrant local FinTech scene of Singapore for a Networking Event in town. 250 invitees will have the chance to network at BASH, the new startup hub in Singapore, for a joint event organised by Innotribe and the following Singapore’s FinTech communities.

Networking-event-partners2

This FinTech Meet-up is kindly sponsored by Wells Fargo and Standard Chartered Bank. Register for the FinTech Meet-Up via this link. Innotribe Sibos attendees will get an invitation card on-site.

The Innotribe closing keynote this year will come from Andrew Keen, one of the world’s best-known and controversial commentators on the digital revolution.

keen_new_profile

He is the author of three books: Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo and his current international hit The Internet Is Not The Answer which the London Sunday Times acclaimed as a “powerful, frightening read” and the Washington Post called “an enormously useful primer for those of us concerned that online life isn’t as shiny as our digital avatars would like us to believe”.

After Andrew Keen, you are all invited to join the Sibos Closing Keynote in the plenary room.

Innotribe is open to all Sibos delegates willing to drive change and embrace innovation for the benefit of the financial industry, by understanding its trends, opportunities, and challenges: business analysts, product managers, strategists, marketing/branding/innovation managers, transaction bankers, securities managers, corporates, standards experts, payment professionals, investment managers, regulators, policy makers.

Other resources:

Looking forward to meeting you in person in Singapore!

Innotribe at Sibos 2015 – “The right mix”

For its seventh year, Innotribe at Sibos goes center stage! This translates into two components: first, some our most successful sessions of previous years go to the main stage: the Future of Money session and the Innotribe Startup Challenge Finale. Second, we are building an awesome innovation hub on the exhibition floor, next to the SWIFT stand.

On the outside, the stand is designed as a vibrant networking area, with exhibition demo stations for the Innotribe Startup Alumni and the late stage semi-finalists of the 2015 Innotribe Startup Challenge. And we’ll have the best coffee corner in town with real baristas.

Inside, the stand will host our circular workshop room. It’s already nicknamed as “The Blender” and has a magical 360° projection wall. This is where the majority of our sessions will take place.

As always, we will introduce the latest innovation trends, whilst delivering thought-provoking content designed to challenge perceptions. Together with global professionals from across the field of innovation, Innotribe will explore topics at the center of the financial services industry agenda in payments, market infrastructures, and the corporate landscape.

In a play of words on Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants”, we have four major themes this year, one theme per day:

  • Day-1: What Platforms Want
  • Day-2: What Society Wants
  • Day-3: What Innovation Wants
  • Day-4: What Machine Intelligence Wants

Across the four days, we have two big design principles: Millennials and Power Women in Finance who will be an integral part of all sessions in this year’s programme. We just launched two whitepapers to prepare us for Innotribe Sibos:

As you may notice, we put a lot of efforts in ensuring diversity by having different thought leaders joining us in every session: men, women, millennials, investors, accelerators and contrarians. Whirling around the room with the different protagonists like in a real blender, we will create the right mix of topics and speakers and create an interactive environment for our audience. This year we also do special effort to integrate art and music in the overall design of all our sessions.

Next to this, the Finale of this year’s Innotribe Startup Challenge will see the 12 early-stage startups selected during the regional showcases pitching their pioneering products and services.

Innotribe is open to all Sibos delegates willing to drive change and embrace innovation for the benefit of the financial industry, by understanding its trends, opportunities, and challenges: business analysts, product managers, strategists, marketing/branding/innovation managers, transaction bankers, securities managers, corporates, standards experts, payment professionals, investment managers, regulators, policy makers.

Registration via Sibos.com: https://www.sibos.com/my/login

Full programme on Sibos.com: https://www.sibos.com/conference/conference-programme/2015?field_session_stream_tid%5B%5D=466&op=Filter

Also see my recent interview on Sibos.com “Innotribe and the future of FinTech innovation”

Millennials and the future of finance: A different kind of trust

A generational shift is underway, which is challenging and reinventing notions of trust in financial services. The Millennial Generation, comprised of those people born between 1982 and 2004 (average age 22), lies at the heart of this shift.

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A couple of months ago, i spotted the twitter stream and website of Wharton FinTech, the first student-led FinTech initiative committed to education, career development and idea promotion by connecting innovative, established, disruptive and proven FinTech enterprises with students and industry professionals.

WhartonFintech Logo

I got into a conversation over Skype with Daniel McAuley and Steve Weiner, the two co-founders of Wharton FinTech, and discovered a rich community of young Wharton MBA students who were passionate about FinTech. They organise study tours in the Valley and elsewhere, have a solid blog, and more importantly have a refreshing view on which financial services resonate with Millennials and which not.

We started an online collaboration to produce a research paper, and after a couple of iterations quickly decided that the underlying theme had to do with trust. A different kind of trust.

Trust is the most important currency in finance. It is fundamental to the smooth running of every financial system in the world, and that is always likely to be so. However, a generational shift is underway that is challenging and reinventing notions of trust in financial services.

Growing up during the global financial crisis and a sluggish period of recovery thereafter, the Millennial Generation is particularly mistrustful of established financial brands and institutions. The effect of this generational shift has been explored by a number of groups, including the innovation group, Scratch. Their Millennial Disruption Index concludes that banks are most likely to be disrupted by Millennial consumer preferences, and are facing massive challenges in terms of approach towards customer acquisition and user experience.

Millennials believe that the way we access money and pay for things will be completely different five years from now. But how do companies understand what trust really means to this generation, and more importantly, find ways to earn and retain it?

The paper explores three main themes:

  • Trust in technology: Millennials trust technology rather than face-to-face relationships and the traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ on-premises user experience. They want entirely new digital products that are relevant to their daily lives. However, there is a fine line between trust in technology and over-reliance on it, and information and identity security is an area of risk that needs to be managed.
  • Trust in networks: FinTech startups built on the back of social networks have a distinct advantage over incumbents when it comes to customer acquisition. By focusing on user experience and viral or ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing, these young firms are often outperforming their better-funded rivals. For those financial services firms looking to gain market share within the Millennials segment, this is an extremely important approach to master.
  • Trust in social causes: Millennials demonstrate a stronger likelihood to buy a product from, or indeed work for, a company with a defined social or environmental mission. They trust companies with social or environmental objectives more than those that are perceived as operating solely for profit. While declaring affiliation to a social cause can attract customers and improve engagement, companies must be careful not to mislead Millennials – they tend to do their research to make sure a company’s claims can really be justified.

Socio-economic and generational dynamics play a critical role in the evolution of financial services. As companies reinvent the way people interact with their money, finance is becoming faster, cheaper and more efficient for individuals and businesses.

The paper can be downloaded here (PDF) and provides valuable guidance on what financial services companies can and should be doing to capitalise on this major generational shift in consumer preferences, and create new opportunities for growth.

Together with Power Women in FinTech, Millennials will play an important role in this year’s Innotribe programme at Sibos, taking place in Singapore from 12-15 October 2015. In preparation for the event and the discussions that will happen onsite at Sibos, the paper examines how the Millennial Generation will help shape the future of finance.

Powerwomen in FinTech

While technology and business models are changing fast, the issue of gender diversity in financial services – particularly at senior leadership levels – is still lagging behind.  A Financial News analysis of Dow Jones Venture Source and Factiva data reveals that, of the 20 European FinTech companies that received the largest venture capital investments in 2014, none had a female chief executive.

A couple of months ago (Nov 26, 2014), I got a DM tweet from @sammaule saying “Been asked to put together a list of top 100 women in FinTech globally for conference in March. Looking for your input.”. I reached out to Sam and suggested we’d make this a major design theme for Innotribe Sibos 2015, and produce a joint whitepaper on Powerwomen in FinTech.

It was the start of a fantastic collaboration with Sam and Christine Duhaime @cduhaime from Digital Finance Institute in Canada, culminating in the release of the paper on June 3, 2015 during at Digital Finance 2015, the first Canadian FinTech conference, in Vancouver.

We did not want it to be yet-another-list. We did not want it to be another girl-geek-power list. What we wanted was a list of women who make a difference in financial services. Whether they were having C-level roles in their organizations or were change agents deep in the fabric of their institutions. Whether they came from big or smaller financial institutions, startups, investors, or VCs. We had the ambition to have a worldwide list.

We compiled all existing lists. Did crowdsourcing via twitter and other social media. We had a good list, but found it a bit light for regions such as South America, Africa, and Asia. We reached out to our contacts in those regions, and got additional suggestions.

We ended up with a list of 437 Powerwomen in Fintech, and could have kept going.

women list graph

The paper draws upon existing research to highlight the reality of today’s situation in FinTech, and it provides recommendations to achieve and accelerate greater gender balance within the industry. A selection of interviews and profiles sit alongside the index, highlighting and celebrating the success stories of just some of the inspiring women who are leading the way and serving as role models to others.

End August we will do an update, and have some more in-depth interviews with 25 Powerwomen from the list.

The paper serves as an eye-opener on the gender diversity gap, in advance of the debate that will continue at Sibos in Singapore, from 12-15 October. Diversity will be one of the main topics covered by the Innotribe@Sibos 2015 programme. A number of the inspirational leaders featured in the Power Women in FinTech index will be involved in Innotribe sessions to discuss the findings of the paper, and make sure the voice of women is heard.

The paper can be downloaded and is a compelling read for anyone involved in the financial industry and beyond.

The time to boost innovation capabilities is now

KCIs help organisations to succeed in the 21st century

It’s no secret that many financial services firms struggle with technology and business model innovation.

With a customer base heavily influenced by their interaction with the likes of Amazon, Alibaba and Apple, and a whole range of new FinTech entrants, financial institutions know that they must adapt to changing consumer expectations.

To link company behaviour to outputs, management teams frequently use KPIs —Key Performance Indicators. KPIs help managers to align behaviour and incentivise performance around specific revenue goals.This works very well until an organisation has to change.

Management may then find itself in the unlucky position of incentivising counterproductive behaviour. As employees continue to focus on execution, the organisation runs the risk of becoming captive to its KPI programme.

To counter this, a fresh line of thinking has been developed, promoting a new set of metrics called KCIs, or Key Capability Indicators. The essential benefit of a KCI is that it measures the capability of an organisation to change at a structural level rather than its ability to create new outputs. It is not an output metric. It does not provide an indicator of new products created, increased profits, or improved asset utilisation. Those types of metrics are already in place and can be adapted readily.

For Innotribe at Sibos 2014, Innotribe commissioned Haydn Shaughnessy, an expert on the topic, to produce a financial services specific KCI Index. This resulted in a compelling presentation at Sibos in which Haydn discussed the innovation capabilities needed by organisations to succeed in the 21st century. Based on the positive feedback of our audience, we decided to consolidate Haydn’s findings in a whitepaper – Innovation in Financial Services: The Elastic Innovation Index Report.

The paper highlights that most organisations lack a KCI set which can make change more manageable. KCIs can:

  • help leaders to understand the skills they need to have in place in order to effect change;
  • provide a model for change because capabilities map directly to a future, desired organisational competency;
  • benchmark their organisation against others;
  • apply to investment decisions;
  • be used as a barometer of capability development.

Developing innovation capabilities can prove challenging; however, once they are institutionalised, it has the advantage of strongly embedding innovation within the organisation. The paper asserts that there are a number of key measurements to assess the innovation capability of financial firms: namely content, platform, leadership, strategy and externalisation.

The white paper provides innovation leaders at financial institutions with a useful benchmark, at a time when developing a set of Key Capability Indicators has never been more critical. Download it here.

Innovation: from tactics to strategy

I was invited at the 7th Banking Innovation Forum in Vienna to speak on Innovation. The title of my talk was “Innovation: from tactics to strategy”

I have posted the deck on Slideshare

It was an interesting audience, with most people coming from Central and Eastern Europe, with some interesting case studies from Paolo Barbesino from UniCredit in Italy, Carlos Gomez from Activo bank in Portugal, Marcel Gajdos from Visa Europe Czech Republic/Slovakia, Efigence in Poland, and Wojciech Bolanowski from PKO Bank Polski. I made quite some notes, and if i find the time to make a post on it, i will.

Luckily, my fans are out there to help me. I planned write something about my talk as well, but Wojciech Bolanowski already did that in his great LinkedIn Post here. I have cut and pasted his post in its entirety, as it captures well what i was trying to convey in that presentation. Thank you so much, Wojciech, much appreciated 😉

+++ Start post Wojciech

Inspire other people, think differently, create spaces where people come alive, ship to customers; as well as bravery, prototyping, events, capabilities and clarity – these are ingredients for successful innovation within big organization; at least according to excellent speaker and Innotribe Co-founder Peter Vander Auwera.

How to innovate in the shadow of behemoth?

marriott

Peter spoke on the first day of 7th Annual Banking Innovation Forum by Uniglobal in Vienna Marriott Hotel (as pictured above). He was keeping the audience extremely focused and interested. The subject was complex and of great importance: how to make really BIG organization innovative. As Peter put it in an outstanding rethoric figure: “how to make babies”. I would like to add: how to make the babies when you are well-known, established, serious and successful one with huge legacy and obliging history.

The questions are (usually) much more important than particular answers, so there is not my goal to report Peters’s solution in details. What I would like to point out is the question itself. Today, in the fast-running world of fin-tech start-ups and quasi-banking innovators almost every bank is big enough to raise this question to itself. Is it enough to inspire other people with your disrutptive ideas? Is such inspiring even possible in organization too big to change itself spontaneously? What could possibly happen if you think differently from dominant thinking styles?

Obviously, being innovative within mammoth-size organization is a big challenge and requires specific attitude and social skills. As I understood one of the Peter’s suggestion is to create appropriate team which become the centre and engine of the process. The brave, capable team with clearly set culture of “rather be failing frequently than never trying new things” to quote Peter’s presentation. Some important tools to do so are special workspaces, integrating events and ways of building true alignment.

Bravery – the slide of the presentation. Source: Uniglobal

How to gain executives’ support?

The presentation was full of insider stories with some of them concerning interactions between innovators and the board members. Those were a great lesson of struggle which, I think, at least to some extend, any innovator should expect and be prepared for. The very useful take-out was about prototyping and commercial launching of innovative products. The prototype should be, according to Peter’s best practice, as vivid and identical with the final product as possible. No more “Power Point Prototypes” unless you would like to fail. What’s even more – prototyping is just a step to the real strategic goal – to deliver real, commercial product and give it to customers. “Go out of the sandbox” is another great statement I heard from the speaker. Indeed, today environment of fast growing and alternating product propositions demand being “on market”. The Grand Jury of customers has no time to screen through pilots or prototypes; every company should be ready to risk and show its innovation as soon as it is delivered. In my opinion this is extremely important to realize. Shipment to customers what is already prototyped is the crucial part of execution process in innovation. I feel it is striking and true, therefore I tweeted this immediately with hashtag #BAIF2015!

What about the reluctant middle-level-managers?

The next splendid remark is about mid-level managers’ attitude toward change. For them the main goal is “too keep any changes far away of the plan”. It is understandable and rational. For manager’s KPIs are target-related, they try to keep organization on the course to achieve them. However, any innovation process within organization creates the risk of change, which, possibly, could alternate plans and goals. This is the real challenge – to execute innovation in organization which mainly consists of medium-level managers. And execution itself is much more difficult and lasts much longer than whole creative process of gathering ideas, evangelization, internal promotion etc. What Peter stressed, and I agree fully, is thatin context of big organizations idea management process is easier and shorter than its incubation and implementation. In start-ups world there is exactly the opposite relation.

Start-ups as indicators

Start-ups in financial sector (dubbed fintech recently) occupied a lot of Peter’s presentation as he is involved in the well-known Innotribe@Sibos program. The event has attracted more than 340 participants this year. It is quite nice sample to show what’s going on in innovation. With four continental semi-finals (NYC, London, Cape Town and Singapore) it gives global overview and prime selection of activities. This could be a useful indicator for big companies to track the start-up trends and pick up something valuable from. For example in 2014 the leading areas of start-up activity were (despite a broad category of corporates/business services) investment management, lending, big data and personal financial management. It is a clear message to banks: there is innovation coming to your core businesses and it is technology-driven.

This post is inspired by presentation shown on of 7th Annual Banking Innovation Forum ; there is another one of this category, in case you are interested:

Collateral damage of 2008 – card revenues in CEE

Peter Vander Auwera on stage in Vienna. Source: Uniglobal

Linguistic disclaimer

I have written this text in English and I know my limitations. It is possible you find this post illogical, offending, unclear or too simplistic. It does not mean to be that way, so please blame it to my imperfect English skills. I am neither native nor perfect English speaking person . If you want to be helpful, do share your grammar, spelling, style and any other remarks with me. I would appreciate any contributing comment, especially if it came from native speakers.

+++ End post Wojciech