The largest FinTech Festival on Earth concluded last week with 5 days around the clock hosting renowned speakers with tons of content around FinTech, innovation, leadership, policy, economy, financial inclusion, payments, and more. The global FinTech community discussed key global challenges, trends, and opportunities for 2021 with a focus on post-pandemic recovery.
Through our participation in SFF along the years, we were able to witness how technology is changing the way we live, work, and interact. This year we observed an acceleration of collaboration models among different stakeholders -not only financial institutions and FinTechs, but regulators and government agencies. And the keystone of this initiative: Open Banking. From countries where regulation defines protocols, to frameworks established by market-driven initiatives, Open Banking is at the center of the conversation, and offers a path forward to digital transformation, financial inclusion, and economic recovery.
As Brett King said in his “Bank of the Future” panel, “Banking 4.0 requires three key players to be working together in this future ecosystem: banks that have transformed physically and survived, tech giants with a technology layer, FinTechs coming in as technology partners offering banking as a service capabilities.”
The panel “How Will the Financial Services Sector Respond in 2021: A View from the LATAM Region” where FinConecta’s Founder and CEO Jorge Ruiz was the moderator, brought important insights to the table regarding Open Banking trends and opportunities in LATAM. The conversation among James P. Scriven, CEO IDB Invest; Laura Borsato, CEO Banco Regional; and Miguel Cortes, CEO Grupo Bolivar provided real life examples of how Open Banking is implemented in institutions across the region beyond regulation, best practices around API monetization, and advancing financial inclusion in several markets.
On another note, the “Sustainable Digital Transformation: What Are the Priorities and Trade-offs?” panel moderated by Nguyen Trieu Huy, featured a conversation about how to successfully merge digital transformation and sustainability. One of the panelists, Irene Arias Hoffman, CEO at IDB Lab, spoke about the trends and best practices in Latin America and the Caribbean, how IDB is driving inclusion in the region, as well as the key role this institution plays in the development of the financial ecosystem overall, accelerated by COVID-19.
In her own words, Irene showcased FinConecta as one of the key players leading this effort forward: “We have to reduce the pain points and the friction of integrating those new solutions and startups with corporates […] Making it easier for that collaboration and integration to happen is really important. FinConecta is helping do that, the integration between startups and banks, reducing the cost of innovation and the process of innovation.”
Jane Fraser, incoming CEO of Citi in her interview by Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer of MAS shared her views about the importance of building ecosystems collaboratively to boost innovation and gain scale, with a new and powerful mindset:
“How do we shift from legacy architecture to an architecture that is much more born digital […] and drive that into a more mobile and digital proposition. This now moves into the world of ecosystems.”
“This is a collaboration model. As many banks, we used to pretend we were a technology company as well as being a bank but now you don’t build it yourself. The innovation is coming from smaller entrepreneurs as much as it comes from larger shops.”
FinConecta is proud to be part of the Singapore FinTech Festival again this year, paving the future to a fully connected financial ecosystem enabled by Open Banking.
Thanks to the organizers for this opportunity to discuss and envision a new possible!
Remember you can watch all the panels and conversations on YouTube for free! Just click here to access the recordings.
Until next year!