A "Shout Out" to Finextra Future Money
2014/05/02
I just spent a couple of fascinating days attending Finextra Future Money in London. The content of the event has already been well covered via a Twitter feed, and Finextra's own live blogs and a post-event summary. I would strongly encourage to click on those links, as the discussions have been interesting, informative, sometimes provocative and always lively. Rather than trying to summarise all the ideas over the last couple of days, I just wanted to highlight and give thanks to:
- Everyone at Finextra, but especially Liz Lumley and Nick Hastings, for putting together a great event and for inviting me to moderate a panel on Convergent Commerce.
- All my panelists - Danielle Anderson (Harris and Hoole), Arun Glendinning (Birdback), Eddie Keal (IBM), Peter Keenan (Zapp) and Paul Thomalla (ACI) - for their insights and making the hour allocated to the panel fly by.
- Richard Brown (IBM), as I never heard anyone speak so clearly and eloquently about cryptocurrencies and their impact on the future of finance.
- Dave Birch (Consult Hyperion), who could probably moderate a panel of actuaries and still make it informative AND entertaining (with apologies to any actuaries!) Given that here both his topic (banking apps and APIs) and panelists were genuinely interesting, it is no surprise that it was perhaps the best session over the two days.
- Bankers, such as Alessandro Hatami (Lloyds), Pol Navarro (Banco Sabadell), Brigid Whoriskey (RBS) and others who bravely presented, engaged and sparred with an audience and sometimes even fellow panelists feisty enough to suggest that "PingIt is nothing more than a PR exercise" or that "Western Union/ SWIFT shouldn't/ won't exist in the near future."
- Everyone with whom I had the pleasure and privilege to chat during the networking breaks.