Digital Finance Summit 2022 – A recap

Final week I had the pleasure once more to attend the yearly Digital Finance Summit (DFS) in Brussels (organized by Fintech Belgium). As every year, this was a super-interesting and fully-packed day of attention-grabbing panels, keynotes and networking,
permitting to get an excellent replace of what’s residing within the Fintech scene usually and within the Fintech scene in Belgium specifically.

Not surprisingly the challenges, but additionally the alternatives are huge and this each for the incumbent monetary gamers as for the brand new Fintech start-ups and scale-ups. Clearly dealing with challenges is intrinsic to doing enterprise, however new is that the
present challenges (like International Warming, Covid relaunch, exploding prices of residing, shifting international powers…​) are international in nature and arriving sooner and sooner (because of the hyper-connected and hyper-informed instances we dwell in). This implies each monetary group
needs to be extraordinarily resilient to adapt shortly to a repeatedly altering surroundings. This requires new methods and new methods of engaged on a number of domains, i.e.

• Firms ought to repeatedly innovate and reinvent themselves. This requires an agile means of working, but it surely additionally signifies that every part needs to be put in place to facilitate this agility, comparable to

  • Lowering silos between departments, i.e. everybody collaborating on a standard firm purpose

  • Steady coaching (upskilling) and mentoring (change administration) of all workers, so that everybody can proceed to be of worth inside a altering firm surroundings

  • Versatile up- and down-scaling of assets, in order that sudden alternatives and threats could be handled as quickly as attainable. This may be carried out through a versatile workforce (e.g. through nearshoring, a worldwide remote-first workforce, through a community
    of freelancers…​)

  • Actual-time availability of high-quality knowledge (and its related insights), in order that the organisation could be adjusted repeatedly based mostly on laborious knowledge and never based mostly on intestine feeling or advanced research that are already outdated by the point they
    are introduced to the administration (knowledge will help improve resilience in an unsure world).
    
    In different phrase, every firm ought to grow to be a data-driven organisation, that means each resolution to launch a brand new initiative is backed up by knowledge and likewise by KPIs that are recurrently evaluated to find out if the initiative (nonetheless) meets its preliminary
    guarantees/expectations (or doubtlessly requires corrections). This permits an “transfer quick – fail quick” strategy.

  • A technological basis and processes supporting this agility. This implies utilization of the cloud (permitting to quickly scale-up and scale-down required IT infrastructure and revel in a mess of tooling and abstraction layers permitting to speed up
    and simplify), new processes like DevSecOps (e.g. steady supply and automatic testing) and Scrum, a contemporary agile software structure (comparable to a micro-service based mostly structure) and a properly decoupled and open API-based infrastructure.
    
    Moreover monetary gamers ought to experiment with new applied sciences comparable to blockchain, AI/ML, Low-code/No-code or the Metaverse, as a way to be already at cruising velocity as soon as these applied sciences grow to be a necessity to deal with a particular (future) problem.

• Firms ought to grow to be trusted and sustainable events locally (ESG motion = Environmental, Social & Governance), i.e. not simply in phrases (e.g. keep away from Greenwashing), however actually ship upon promise. This implies:

  • Placing the buyer’s pursuits first (it’s all about pleased prospects)

  • Offering transparency on all fronts. This doesn’t solely imply transparency on pricing and commissions and on all processes and companions, but additionally give full transparency in case one thing goes mistaken and clarify for what knowledge is requested and what will probably be used
    for.

  • Making certain good safety & knowledge privateness (cyber-security ought to already be a prime precedence of each govt at present)

  • Appearing sustainable and ethically in all merchandise and processes (e.g. cut back vitality consumption, cut back waste, don’t exploit employees, work with sustainable and moral suppliers…​)

• Firms also needs to make investments closely of their folks (workers), because the expertise within the group will decide the adequacy and velocity an organisation can react to alter. This implies:

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  • Attracting the best and greatest folks, which is barely attainable when the corporate is enticing for top-talent. That is laborious because the warfare for expertise is fierce, particularly for the profiles everyone seems to be in search of, like advertising and marketing, UX, full-stack
    builders or AI engineers (or extra normal knowledge engineers & knowledge analysts).

  • Steady studying/coaching to make sure each worker stays related and of worth for the altering organisation. This consists of growing each the laborious and smooth abilities.

  • Taking motion that the well being and wellbeing of each worker is taken at coronary heart and this each bodily as psychological well being. With normal well being dropping year-by-year (greater than 55% of Belgians is obese or overweight, greater than 25% of Belgians
    has a persistent situation, 10-15% of Belgians undergo from psychological sickness and 21% of Belgians suppose they may undergo from a burnout within the close to future) it’s a ethical responsibility of each employer to take motion on this. This is not going to solely enhance the power of the
    firm to draw and retain top-talent, however it’ll additionally end in large value financial savings, as (long-term) sick workers value huge quantities to firms in lack of productiveness, but additionally in different prices like discovering and onboarding (momentary) replacements.

• Firms ought to concentrate on what they do greatest, i.e. their core enterprise and core competencies. These are probably the domains the place the enterprise is ready to adapt/pivot the quickest to altering market circumstances. For all non-core actions, it
  is most well-liked to accomplice with third-parties in an ecosystem. Clearly this requires a complete new means of doing enterprise and these partnerships come additionally with fairly some new challenges. An ecosystem is barely as robust as its weakest hyperlink with
  regards to safety, so it’s essential to impose excessive safety necessities on companions, do a correct evaluation of every accomplice (i.e. KYC or higher KYP = Know Your Accomplice) and put robust controls (e.g. Zero-trust structure) and an excellent knowledge collaboration
  mannequin in place.

• Firms ought to undertake a hyper-personalized, customer-first strategy. Prospects have gotten increasingly demanding (an “it’s all about me” mentality) and wish hyper-personalization. Moreover by preserving a hyper-focus on the wants and
  needs of every particular person buyer, a company will have the ability to decide up on altering market circumstances very early, permitting to pivot properly in-advance of the market.

Aside from having to deal with these challenges to remain commercially related, governments are additionally introducing plenty of new directives and legal guidelines (e.g. PSD3, GDPR, Knowledge Service Act = DSA, Knowledge Governance Act, DORA…​), with which they struggle
on their flip to control and management these international challenges and clearly each firm must adjust to these laws. This additionally requires plenty of effort and agility, however when these laws are correctly addressed, they will additionally end in aggressive
benefits. Particularly within the area of information safety and knowledge governance, plenty of modifications are upcoming, with Europe main the best way for the remainder of the world. These laws will give entry to new knowledge units, permitting to assist new consumer journeys, however
in addition they include plenty of new challenges, as shoppers and governments are increasingly delicate of a safe and privacy-aware processing of all knowledge.

Fortunately, monetary firms (each incumbents and Fintechs) have many instruments at hand to deal with these challenges and assist these new methods and new methods of working. Know-how, digitalization and partnerships (ecosystems) will allow
to offer this agility and resilience, e.g.

• New rising applied sciences (like blockchain, AR/VR, 5G, 3D printing, quantum computing, IoT…​) give the tooling to firms to deal with the problems and challenges

• Digitalization of all processes permits to cut back handbook, resource-intensive processes and provides new alternatives. Moreover this digitalization could be accelerated by applied sciences like cloud, open-source software program, partnerships with software program
  distributors and Fintechs…​

• Actual-time entry to good high quality knowledge from a complete spectrum of information sources, i.e. from inner sources (extra simply accessible through new applied sciences like knowledge lakes, knowledge pipelines, event-driven architectures, AI/ML…​), knowledge from companions,
  knowledge from events pressured by regulation to open their knowledge (like banks in context of PSD2), knowledge suppliers who commercialize the gathering, centralization and cleansing of various knowledge units and “Open Knowledge” sources (increasingly firms are opening sure
  inner knowledge units to the world without spending a dime, in follow-up of the open supply motion). Moreover new privacy-aware and/or DeFi applied sciences permit to share insights derived from knowledge from 2 or extra totally different events, with out every get together having to share the
  knowledge itself to the opposite get together. E.g. a number of banks may collaborate on fraud detection with out really having to share their knowledge, i.e. all knowledge stays encrypted, aside from the algorithm doing the fraud detection.

• Setup of partnerships and ecosystems, permitting to ship an end-to-end consumer expertise, with out having to construct up all experience and put money into all domains.

In the entire above you may clearly determine 3 tendencies within the Fintech and monetary providers business usually, i.e.

• Knowledge is valuable, but additionally very dangerous (“Knowledge is gold and even higher uranium” as Marc Lainez from Isabel Group rightly identified on the DFS summit). Firms want to gather (from a steady rising variety of sources) a most of information
  (each internally and externally through partnerships) and perceive this knowledge, by cleansing and structuring (plenty of knowledge remains to be unstructured and inaccessible) the uncooked knowledge and changing this knowledge into actionable insights. On the identical time, firms want
  to do that in a safe and privacy-aware means (“Your knowledge, your guidelines”), because the destructive impacts of information breaches could be huge.

• Firms must be increasingly conscious of their function within the general society and handle correctly all their stakeholders (ESG), i.e. shareholders, prospects, governments, suppliers, residents (society usually) and workers and act accountable
  and moral in direction of all of them. Firms failing to take action, will lose prospects, will be unable to draw top-talent and can be excluded from sure valuable ecosystems, which signifies that the medium- to long-term impression could be devastating.

• Partnerships are the unmistaken path ahead for each incumbents as for Fintechs. Whereas 10 years in the past most Fintechs had been very disruptive and competing heads-on in opposition to incumbent gamers, at present most Fintechs are working for incumbents, partnering
  with them or have chosen a distinct segment, which isn’t a major focus of incumbents. Opposite to what was assumed within the early days of the Fintech motion, incumbents haven’t misplaced a lot market-share to the Fintechs on this world, however somewhat (a few of them) have
  been in a position to steadily remodel themselves to fashionable, digital gamers, with the assist of particular Fintechs (and due to the strain of these disruptive Fintechs).

So briefly, a lot of concepts to consider and put into motion in 2023. Wanting ahead becoming a member of DFS 2023 subsequent 12 months.