2014 seems like a very long time ago… Before Covid-19, before Open banking, before the blockchain hype… Much has happened since we started with the first event on 23 October 2014. A crazy idea to bring people together, to understand how technology is changing finance. Fintech is of course a buzzword, indicating a new world of finance, based on smartphones, seamless journeys, and giving control to the customer, in a way the incumbent industry was not able to do before. Now in 2020, things look much different. The opposition of innovative startups vs incumbent financials has faded. Everyone has jumped on the bandwagon of an agile way of working, customer experience, API’s and mobile-first and is working nowadays on shared challenges like AML, cybersecurity, or fighting the Corona pandemic. Collaboration is the key.

Just like there was a need for an ecosystem back in 2014, when it was hard to oversee the challenges that the surge in startups and new innovations would bring to the industry, today, we stand for new challenges that also ask for a collaborative approach, making the case for participation in an open ecosystem like Holland Fintech. The changes in the industry have certainly not lost pace, but they may have gotten new names and faces. Blockchain became tokenization, big data became AI and fintech is becoming digital finance. But even though the names we use to study and understand the developments around us and to where the future is leading us, learning about it rests on the same principle: access to leading insights and knowledge needs to go hand in hand with a social context, to help people make sense of it all. And as the world of finance keeps on changing, we will be there to provide people with the knowledge and the social context, as well as to bring collaboration opportunities to everyone.

We owe many thanks to all our members, who have made it possible since 2014 to realize the vision of an open fintech ecosystem, and who are supporting us to date by co-creating and being part of this leading fintech ecosystem. And I really want to express my thanks to my colleagues at Holland Fintech, the current team, as well as everyone that has worked with us over the past 6 years, for all the hard work and creativity that has been invested in our knowledge, network, and services. I am very proud to see the progress that everyone has seen individually, as well as with our company.

I am very curious about what the coming 6 years will bring us! The road will likely be a bumpy ride, as it was before. But I am looking forward to it anyway!

All the best!
Don

PS. And as the world keeps on changing, so do we… Stay posted as a member or via our newsletters, and learn about some exciting developments soon!

PPS. Want to see what you remember of the past years at Holland Fintech: Take the quiz!