Innovate Finance flies the flag for the UK’s fintech sector in return of global summit
The Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS) is marking its 10th anniversary this year by highlighting the current and future innovations that are continuing to put the UK’s fintech industry at the centre of the global stage.
The Innovate Finance Global Summit 2024 is taking place in London
The summit, which has returned to London’s historic Guildhall to host its two-day agenda for 2024 in conjunction with UK Fintech Week, is seeking to actively accommodate sector-wide discussions, collaborations and thought leadership with a specific focus on the technologies capable of promoting scale and stability across the industry nationally.
The future of UK fintech
In her opening remarks, Janine Hirt, CEO of Innovate Finance, explained that the aim of the event’s decennial celebration was to “not look back, but to look forward”.
She added that to achieve this, the industry association is currently pursuing a fintech manifesto centred on developing the UK as a global hub for the smart data economy and as a prime destination for the adoption of new technologies and secure finance.
These forward-looking efforts have been boosted by the inception of the Unicorn Council for UK Fintech (UCFT) last month, which is to be chaired by Hirt alongside Charles McManus, CEO of ClearBank, and Philip Belamant, CEO of Zilch.
Speaking to FinTech Futures at the summit on Monday, Hirt said Innovate Finance has reflected on everything it’s achieved since the event’s debut in 2015, and is now “focusing on what we want to do in the next 10 years”.
Its vision for the industry, as Hirt explained, is intrinsically linked to the efforts of the UK’s main regulatory forces, with the group serving as a highway of communication between fintech and the government.
She described this year’s IFGS agenda – with core themes including generative AI, digital assets and tokenisation, open banking and embedded finance – as “a deep dive into so many of the technologies that are underpinning this so-called revolution”.
While stressing the topic of AI as “a serious conversation we need to have”, Hirt also emphasised the summit’s renewed focus on regtech, as she says “this is an area we think the UK can be a global leader on”.
With its wide-reaching and ambitious remit on show, the summit this year did not fail to attract a diverse selection of fintech delegates, industry leaders and influential thinkers to the UK capital for the opening day’s proceedings.
Innovation and IPOs
Leading from the top, Charles McManus, along with Revolut UK CEO Francesca Carlesi; Iana Dimitrova, CEO of OpenPayd; Francesco Simoneschi, co-founder and CEO of TrueLayer; Thought Machine CEO Paul Taylor; and former news anchor Sasha Qadri set forth their expectations for the industry in the session ‘Generation unicorn: CEO perspectives on the next decade of growth‘.
The conversation delved into the group’s thoughts and attitudes towards the current and future direction of the industry, with the primary areas of thought focused on the impact of innovation, the retention of talent and the UK’s current battles with “brain drain”.
However, the leading topic to emerge from this conversation appeared to be that of stock market flotations, with the panel assessing the pros and cons of a London-based debut.
For McManus, whose company recently celebrated its first full year of profitability, the current market for IPOs in the UK is “starting to see some traction”, despite, in his opinion, liquidity challenges remaining “a massive issue”.
The panel unanimously agreed upon the immense level of discipline needed among a C-suite to tap the benefits of an IPO, and of the strategic advantages of listing in the same jurisdiction as key business activities, with Dimitrova particularly highlighting the UK’s strong talent pool and technological understanding as a benefit to this endeavour.
Regulation, regulation, regulation
On the regulatory front, Ian Phoenix, director of intelligence and digital at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), took to the Old Library stage in the afternoon for his keynote, ‘Innovation in financial services while protecting the consumer‘, which addressed the balance between regulatory enforcement and financial innovation.
Phoenix revealed the close alignment of the regulator’s current agenda with that of the summit’s host, naming “AI and quantum, financial inclusion and open finance” among its leading and most current lines of focus.
“We want to continue to evolve with your developments and changes in the market and technology,” he told the audience.
Other noted sessions from day included ‘Preparing for the future: a reshaping of financial services’, which brought together figures from JP Morgan, Mastercard, Lloyds Banking Group, Citi and London-based early-stage investor Antler to discuss the integration of emerging technologies into incumbents’ legacy systems; ‘Cents and sensibility: raising a financially literate generation‘, which sought to address money management and investment skills among adolescence with thought leadership from TotallyMoney, GoHenry, Finimize, Wealth Wizards and the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE); and ‘Navigating the AI landscape: considerations to address for fintech companies using AI‘, which heard from representatives of Miquido, Baker McKenzie, Airwallex, KPMG and Kingston University.
Looking ahead
In review, 2024 marked an intriguing shift in the summit’s ambitions and focus, with many of the conversations around the integration of technology and finance actively seeking to understand not only how the industry’s start-up community can be best supported, but how their succeeding evolution as scale-ups can ascend to the next level.
“The difference is now we’ve actually already proved how much of an impact fintech has,” Hirt tells FinTech Futures. “And so now we’re having discussions about not just supporting early-stage companies, but about taking them to that next level and supporting the high-growth companies that are already impacting so many consumers across the entire UK.”
This support is being carried through to the event’s agenda for day two on Tuesday, which aside from continuing to encourage industry thinking around topics of data, fraud, cross-border and open banking, will also see start-ups go head-to-head at the summit’s highly-anticipated Pitch360 sessions.
