Money 20/20 Day 3 Review

Talking points of the conference

So today was the final day of Money2020 Europe and it felt like a new logical family was disbanding. Again, there was a phenomenal choice for delegates when it came to attending keynotes and track sessions so it’s a challenge to select highlights. Nonetheless…

Entrepreneur Nuno Sebastiao made a compelling case for artificial intelligence to solve the problems of moving digital money safely, which is what his company FeedZai is focused upon. He gives the example: of $30 trillion moved through electronic payment almost $16 billion of it gets lost to fraud. That’s some slice of the cake! Nuno set out to use machine learning “in novel ways” based on his work at the European Space Agency – how he became an entrepreneur and gave up his cushdie job at ESA is a good story in itself. Feedzai now has more than $32 million in venture funding, worldwide offices, plans to reach 300 employees by the end of the year, and makes commerce safe for internationally recognised banks, retailers and companies as they shift from physical to digital. So how is Feedzai helping to solve the multi-million dollar question around electronic fraud detection and prevention market fraud? In lay terms, by removing the layers of human monitoring and replacing it with an automated process by aggregating and correlating omnidata. What follows is a previously unseen finely tuned level of analysis and granularity. its technology identifies trends and patterns and then predicts in real-time whether a transaction is good or bad. Needless to say, this keynote grabbed huge attention – for the banking bunch it could have felt like a real-time superhero had landed on stage.

The Money20/20 app was something we all had access to and while very many people liked it and used it, others – the traditionalists maybe – indulged in their old-fashioned hard copy, which still has its place. It surely reflects the current mixed mindsets in our market? The push notifications for the start of all the sessions, which had been personalised through selected choices, provided very cool prompts. (Legitimate excuse to untangle oneself from stand conversations and get there on time.) Similarly, if you’d done the tick box exercise the recommended introductions to new contacts had great potential to bring people together. In terms of using 121 messaging in app, I’m not sure how many people were using it – the messages came through sure enough and although it had potential to be really useful, delegates just didn’t seem to be making the most of it. However, the streams in ‘agenda’ (‘my schedule’ and ‘recommended’), which again were personalised were really useful – having everything in one place where there is also straight forward content, easy access and agility is definitely the way forward.

We can’t not mention Rita Liu, head of EMEA, Alipay the lifestyle super app, whose focus is to bring more merchants into the Alipay folds adding to the 450 million users in China so they can better engage with Chinese customers. The cashless lifestyle has proved fantastically popular and Rita wants to bring the alternative payment method to EMEA. She’s said that the company is investing in AI, facial recognition and verification, big data, VR and VA and cloud computing. For Alipay, technology is helping them to become more efficient and convenient for their customers.

And we really mustn’t forget the brilliant artwork that’s set a fantastic tone to the event – a gong for the artist, please!

Buzzwords

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) returns us to the blockchain buzzword of day one and it refers to the consensus of digital data which is replicated, shared and synchronised across borders, numerous sites or places.

Frictionless customer experience – whatever it takes to avoid hindering the buying experience. It refers to the very means by which retailers can make payments as fast, as easy and hopefully as enjoyable as possible.

Multimodal biometrics is a catchall term to note the combination of two or more biometrics forms –such as fingerprint, iris, voice-activation, vein – during an identification authentication system.

Heard absolutely everywhere, ‘disruption’ refers to the way in which the market is being deconstructed by newcomers (fintechs) who are introducing new ways of doing things and looking at things. Disruptive in a good way – depending on where you’re sitting, perhaps.

We haven’t touched much on the more traditional tools of supporting banks and financial institutions in their transformation but marketing and PR is certainly here to stay. But they are undergoing their own changes too, and one of them revolves around the quality of storyboarding which brings us to a good sounding buzzword: ‘immersive content’. It refers to the new form of storytelling which stimulates all our senses – it may include sound and visuals through virtual reality, for instance. It seeks to forge innovative digital ways of taking a brand closer to its customer.

Lesser used buzzword which will grow as time goes by (even though it’s been around since the 1960s), is, ‘data and algorithm innovation’. It’s where the analysis of big data – data sets that are too large and complex to be studied without software – is done through algorithms. And algorithms, less we forget, are self-contained sequences of actions to be performed.

And to end our third day review, we’ll have ‘crypto currency’ as our finale. Operating entirely independently of a central bank, or any sort of bank for that matter, crypto currency is a digital currency and encryption techniques have been deployed to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds. It is not regulated and it is decentralised.

Announcements

From Tuesday, an exclusive to FinTechInsider: Solaris Bank and multi-product open banking API, Rails Banks announced their new collaboration as Solaris will use the RailsBank platform allowing both to raise their game in previously weak areas. Solaris acknowledges RailsBank’s innovative technologies and their ability to help them tap into the UK market while not holding a licence to bank whereas Solaris has the licence and is able to raise the profile of the fintech. “It’s the next step and makes a lot of sense.”

Written by Tori Hywel-Davies