Innovation & Insight Day – some highlights; and a goodbye

Last week was busy for Celent: on Monday we hosted our annual Innovation and Insight Day at Carnegie Hall (more on that later). Tuesday we assembled the Celent team from around the globe for our annual in-person meeting. We find that even in this age of virtual teams and instant connectivity, there’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction; our gathering confirmed that. And on Wednesday the banking team convened to review our priorities and refresh our topic taxonomy – so much has changed in the last year that we knew it was time for a refresh. Keep an eye on celent.com and my newsletter for updates on our progress. For the first time in I&I’s history, we sold the place out! We’ve never had to turn people away before, and we’re (very frankly) still trying to figure out why. With more than 400 registrants, we had to improvise with an overflow room that streamed video of the main stage (thanks to all who helped us accommodate this nice problem). We hypothesize that the challenges of financial technology have become so important that our clients and prospects prioritized attendance at an event that showcased best practices from around the world, afforded tremendous networking opportunities, and provided an unbiased view of the hottest issues in this space today. It could also have been, of course, being in New York the weekend before, or seeing Carnegie Hall during business hours. The Banking Team recognized nineteen model banks across five categories: Digital; Omnichannel; Legacy and Ecosystem Transformation; Innovation and Emerging Technologies; and Payments. Interestingly, we had so many entries in the first two categories that we had to split them up. We produced six reports covering these five areas, together with our Model Bank of the Year, Fidor (from Germany). Clients may download these reports at Celent.com. In addition to our model bank panels we had excellent keynote speakers. Debra Jasper and Betsy Hubbard of Mindset Digital used about 300 [sic] slides in 45 minutes to prod us all to rethink how we present ourselves, not just in person, but through emails and social media. One concrete hint: think about five sentence emails (five.sentenc.es). Closing out the day was Suresh Ramamurthi, the Chairman of CBW Bank, who showed us what a sub $20mm asset bank can do by completely rethinking its technology platform. After Suresh and Fidor’s CEO Matthias Krӧner spoke, I was compelled to tweet about #nervousbankers. I’d also like to thank our sponsors: Saffron, Mindtree, Indra, Guidewire, Wipro Digital, Inetco, and RGI Group, together with our media partners Bank Technology News and Insurance Networking News. We’re already starting to think about next year’s event; it’s not too early to start submitting nominations. We’ll be sending out hold the date announcements shortly. On a final note, we’d like to say a fond farewell to Jacob Jegher. He has been a stalwart in the banking practice for the last eight years, and all of us at Celent will miss his passion for new technologies, his informed and reasoned opinions, and his keen intellect. We wish him every success in his new endeavor at a fintech player you all know; the news will be public soon. If you’d like more details, please reach out to your account manager, other analysts you know, or me directly.