IPS 2014 Roundup

So you’ll have gathered from recent blog posts that it’s conference season. This is the first of a few posts rounding up some of my recent events. This post is about International Payments Summit (IPS) which took place last month. Jacob mentioned in his Finovate post that he ensures that he attends as many sessions as possible – IPS is very much turning into my equivalent. I wrote last year about my return to the event after a long absence. This year didn’t disappoint either. For me, there is a great mixture of depth but also variety, with many speakers I’d not seen before. It’s not a cheap show, but content wise, worthwhile. If I had to make some suggestions, I’d suggest perhaps fewer 20min presentations. Whilst I can think of one speaker where that was probably 18m too long, there were some others who deserved longer. Lots of notes and things to follow-up on, but two themes really stood out. 1) Innovation. Some great presentations, some challenging ideas. For me, the most provocative was from Mark Stevenson, of Flow Associates. The famous baseball player Yogi Berra once famously said “The future ain’t what it used to be”. Mark left me feeling somewhat like that! I can’t do his presentation justice here, but from the advent of cheap solar power to impact of 3D printers, the picture of the world that Mark painted was necessarily, radically different than the world of today. But effectively the punch line to the presentation was that this future was not 50 years away, but only 5. Scary, scary thoughts ensued as we thought this through! 2) Regulation. The second day of the conference fell the night after the second draft of the PSD2 was voted upon in Brussels. The speaker had attended the session, and then hot-footed it to London – content can’t get much fresher! But across the conference, there were some very deep, technical discussions, which even I struggled with at times. Regulation seems to be getting ever more complex and specialised. The conference closed with the panel that I sat on, where we summarised the key points of the conference. My take away was labelled “Mind the gap”. I was particularly struck about how little overlap there was between the innovation and regulation discussions, and noticeably, how they were moving further apart. It would seem, considering the sheer volume of regulation that banks face, an obvious place for innovation to take place.