FinovateEurope 2024: Tech demos, AI and tokenisation dominate day one
FinovateEurope is back with a bang this week, gathering tech experts and thought leaders from all corners of the industry for its opening day on Tuesday.
Tamang Ventures’ Nina Schick takes to the stage at FinovateEurope 2024
In the essence of ‘try before you buy’, the event’s first day, held in London, UK, was heavily orientated around a stream of live product demos, in which fintechs were given a seven-minute window to present their latest innovations, solutions and groundwork.
Estonian challenger Tuum opened the floor with a live demonstration of its core banking platform, followed by Swiss start-up Delega with its new treasury management system, and Lithuanian fintech Torus, which showcased how its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) intelligence platform could drive profits through card transactions.
Later on, Hungary’s Realmonitor cultivated intrigue with how its white-label app could provide banks with an entry point into the mortgage market by leveraging AI, while Australia’s Easylodge guided the crowd through its loan servicing platform and its newly announced plans to launch in the UK in the coming months.
Kosta Patsan, managing director of Easylodge, says that this expansion will stem from its new deal with a Shariah-compliant lender based in the country. “We’re currently busy setting up all the infrastructure and processes as well as establishing a local partner to support our clients here,” he tells FinTech Futures.
Also gracing the main stage was investment advisory platform TradingValley, London-based fintech Intrepid Fox, which presented its know your business (KYB) and compliance platform, and Icelandic fintech Taktikal, which explored the use of its SmartFlows solution for digital onboarding and signatures.
Tinna Hallbergsdóttir, chief compliance officer for Taktikal, describes SmartFlows as “a holistic solution for your onboarding processes, built around the user experience and with the scope of constantly changing regulations in mind”.
In a push to broaden the scope of the event, the first day’s agenda also included a series of presentations and keynote addresses.
Of these, some of the most attended were ING Bank’s joint address with LiveBank, the customer engagement platform launched by Ailleron, which took a deep dive into mortgage technology, followed by Nina Schick, founder of Tamang Ventures, who utilised her keynote to evaluate the next evolution of AI technologies, a central theme within this year’s proceedings.
Schick put the “foundational principles” facilitating the rise of AI’s proliferation across the financial industry down to just three main basics, being “the extraordinarily increasing power of computing”, the wider availability and application of data, which she designates as “the fuel that feeds these artificially capable systems”, and “the school of AI research”, which she says has given rise to “tremendous advances over the past decade”.
In another well-attended special address, Nick Kerigan, head of innovation at Swift, took to the main stage to discuss what he describes as “a defining moment in the history of finance”, namely how long established forms of payments and assets are being “rapidly tokenised”.
Expanding on this, he went on to reveal that, as part of its innovation agenda, Swift intends to “harness the power of tokenisation, AI and other disruptive technologies to deliver the next generation of transactions that are truly instant and frictionless”.
“We’re moving into a period where you can tokenise anything from stocks and shares, to private market assets and of course, money itself,” Kerigan explained to attendees.
“But what’s really exciting our community is the potential for the underlying blockchain and smart contract technology to enable us to synchronise the transfer of asset ownership and the associated payments together, instantly.”
Striking while the iron’s hot, the event’s agenda for its second day of proceedings on Wednesday is expected to address topics including the hyper-personalisation of financial services and the banking models that support them, the vital role of industry collaboration and co-creation, the flow of fintech investments into emerging markets, and how competition is driving the fast-paced world of payments.
