Fintech companies offering support to those struggling through the conflict in Ukraine led the applause in Amsterdam on Wednesday. While dancing ice cream sellers and a food-delivering robot served up the smiles.
The Fintech Times brings you a roundup of day two of Money20/20 Europe 2022.
So far, Money20/20 Europe has attracted more than 6,500 delegates from over 2,100 companies. Across its seven stages, the event has served up 380 speakers – 40 per cent of those are women (up 38 per cent from 2021),
The morning
Tuesday kicked off with our very own editorial director Mark Walker moderating a session on The Big Picture Stage with Louise Hill, co-founder and COO of GoHenry, Yorick Naeff, co-founder and CEO of BUX and Andrew Ellis, CEO of Mettle. The panel mulled over the ways challenger banks can learn from their predecessors.
Naeff said: “One of the most important things they can learn is what not to do. If you look at the history of these traditional banks, they’ve made a lot of mistakes.”
While Ellis commented: “Traditional banks have been around for centuries and centuries and have made every mistake in the book – and continue to do so. As a traditional bank you get bashed, by customers on social media, by politicians, etc, so you’ve got to have thick skin. My advice to a challenger bank as you get bigger is to develop a thick skin, because it’s coming.”
While over on the Planetarium Stage, a panel including Deniz Guven, CEO & co-founder of PlatformXIT, Emelie Magnusson, chief product officer of SEBx, and Gareth Richardson, chief operating officer at Thought Machine, debated whether and how banks should adopt a modern, cloud native core if they want to define, design and launch products that will shape the future of the industry.
Richardson, said: “Cloud is just a buzzword, a set of technologies. It’s more about how you deploy them. Everybody else uses them everywhere else but they’re just relatively new to financial services. Which means we don’t have the talent with financial services knowledge with those skills, necessarily, but that is changing and has been changing for the last five or six years.”
On how to move forward, Guven said: “I’m a big fan of Liverpool and Liverpool fans always say ‘never walk alone’, right? And you should never walk alone. It’s super important in our business as well. Especially, if you’re coming from really deep and if you don’t have a customer base, the infrastructure or distribution channels, then you have to go with partners.”
Meanwhile, on the Big Picture Stage, Bernd Leukert at Deutsche Bank chatted with Dr. Daniel Holz, VP EMEA North at Google Germany about their strategic partnership. They outlined the results of the cloud migration and the technological integration.
Midday
Again the Big Picture Stage provided the setting, as Valentin Stalf, co-founder and CEO of N26, provided insight into the neobank and what the future look like for N26. He also admitted N26 needs to do better when it comes to women in leadership roles.
He said: “It’s not that we have no female leaders in the business at all. But at the same time, I think it’s important to recognise that we need to bring in more female leaders in the teams. In tech, it’s harder to bring in female talent, nevertheless, I think we need to work on bringing more female leaders in and we can put more effort into recruiting from my perspective.”
The afternoon
Oleksandr Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of digital transformation of Ukraine, alongside Mark Barnett, president of Europe at Mastercard, was joined by female leaders at SportBank, Ibox Bank and Leo, Izi Bank and NABU in a session on the conflict in Ukraine and how fintech has played its part. Their amazing efforts recognised with applause from the audience.
In a recorded message, Bornyakov outlined the government’s long-term strategy to make Ukraine one of the largest European IT hubs. While Mastercard announced a new Start Path initiative that has been specifically designed for Ukrainian fintechs and entrepreneurs to enable Ukrainian startups to accelerate growth and contribute to the rebuilding of the country’s economy. The initiative will launch this autumn, with the application process opening later this summer.
Also spotted…
The passionate guys over at the Smash ‘n’ Roll ice cream booth near The Lost Lounge proved a hit. They served up an overdose of positive vibes and delicious ice cream rolls. While a robot served up croissants for breakfast!
