Karmic Code Monkey

I just finished day 1 of Money 20/20 Europe. I stuck mainly to the large sessions and to the show floor. What I saw was a repeated vision of what this group in finance sees as the next set of important things to be tackled. Everything they are doing revolves around the customer and making things better for customers. Depending on where you are in the financial ecosystem determines which pieces you are building and which pieces you are integrating.

From the banking side, we heard from many folks. I took the most notes from the talks by Ralph Hamers (CEO of ING Group) and Andy Maguire (Group COO at HSBC). After these two, the themes repeated which only solidified that they weren’t unique in their visions. Because banks already have the balance sheets and other nuts and bolts of building a banking business, their vision is to provide a banking platform that other businesses can plug into. Any workable platform must be open: competitors need to be able to plug into it just as easily as partners. This will allow the bank to stay good at what it knows while letting other partners fill the gaps with the wide variety of expertise that the bank does not have so that it can participate in new opportunities more easily. For example, many banks are finding success by going into geographies where their customers only interact with them over a digital experience: no human to human interaction over 99% of the time. To do this, they craft their platform and their onboarding experience to be as easy to use as possible. Several banks talked of doing work to reduce the integration times with their platforms from months down to weeks. These efforts are paying off to allow the banks to find ways to interact with more customers in more countries.

From the FinTech side of the house (which for this conference so far is the “everyone else” even though I know this leaves out personal finance folks), I saw a lot of interesting technology. A lot of the technology focused on a few areas, all with interesting takes on how to accomplish the goals. I saw a lot of distributed ledger technology (aka blockchain) with implementations that have already gone live. It wasn’t clear to me how blockchain is being leveraged, but tomorrow promises to have a number of talks around the “what” and “how”. The show also has a number of folks presenting different ways to present your identity. Many of these still focus around the two factors for authenticating and many are avoiding passwords, PIN codes, and the like. The primary mechanism here is:

1. Some biometric. Two most commonly cited are fingerprint and face.
2. Smart phone.

So, yes, the argument that goes “What about people from [some part of world that they think doesn’t have Android or Apple phones]?” is not under consideration. In the countries where the banks operate, they know that most of their customers have smart phones.

The final thing I noticed is that AI came up a bunch and it was all nebulous to the speakers. Asking some of the AI firms on the floor, the sales folks know that they have data scientists and those people build and maintain their models. AI/ML is being applied to Know Your Customer/Anti-money Laundering work as well as fraud detection. Given the sales process, my guess here is that the people who need the tech will talk to those who make it and then have their engineers have the nitty gritty discussions of integration. I’m definitely looking forward to learning more there.

I also spent a bit of time on the show floor. Because it’s banking, a lot of the vendors create solutions that run in the client data center OR the cloud. For those folks, I’d like to let you know that you should look at joining the Azure Marketplace. This can give you ease of deployment for your customers who run in Azure and is fairly handy for VM only deployments. Contact me and I can help you get on board.