24 Feb Trending FinTech Topics Finovate 2015
Mid February London was the stage of FinovateEurope, the prime FinTech event in Europe. The event hosted over 72 FinTech startups who introduced themselves to 1,250 visitors in 7 minutes time each. No boring Powerpoint presentations, only live demos were allowed. The visitors were made up of bankers, investors and other startups.
KPMG is one of the members of Holland FinTech and has been involved in the FinTech ecosystem for quite a while now. KPMG also sponsored Finovate. For those of you who didn’t attend the event, but are interested in the latest FinTech news, KPMG provides an overview of all relevant and interesting developments in this guest blog.
No disruptive business models
This year didn’t show any revolutionary new ideas. The presented innovations were all based on the current trends within the FinTech ecosystem, especially in the banking sector, and are well known by the people who follow the FinTech sector closely. FinTech innovations in the insurance sector were noticeably absent.
Capital in search of good business ideas
The investments in FinTech have been on a rise in the last few years. Not only the number of investors, but also the amount of investments shows an enormous yearly growth. This was very noticeable at Finovate this year: a large number of Venture Capitalists were present in London and were actively connecting with startups. Some participating startups were openly searching for investments. Some of the attending banks had just that in mind: possible opportunities to invest.
The Netherlands was well represented
The Netherlands stood out from the crowd with a large number of FinTech companies presenting and attending. The presenting FinTech companies were AdviceGames, BackBase, Fobiss, Invoicesharing, FiveDegrees and Topicus. The Netherlands is getting increasingly known as a FinTech hub, evidenced by the large number of investments in Dutch startups in the recent months. Europe is taking the Netherlands very serious and is encouraging the Netherlands in these recent developments.
Access to Account (PSD II), Card control, automatic peer-to-peer lending and videos
Almost all participating startups could be categorized in the following well-known FinTech categories: mobile payments (sometimes bitcoin related), personal finance management, peer-to-peer lending (crowd funding), investments & wealth management, security and new banking tools. Some interesting examples seen at Finovate are:
- Following the revision of the Payment Service Directive, some startups have shown innovations concerning the increased insight in data from payment transactions and are offering easy, realtime insights in payments, savings goals, budgetting and personalized offers based on historical consumption behavior. Privacy issues regarding this data seem to be ignored.
- Card control or card management applications allow customers to modify or restrict their (credit)card settings according to for example a specific part of the world, type of purchase, etcetera.
- Multiple crowd funding/peer-to-peer lending platforms presented the opportunity for automated investing: the so called batch-investments, where an investment is automatically spread over multiple interesting projects. This opens up new opportunities for investing and asset management by private individuals and professional investors.
- We can expect some video messages from our bankers. CRM systems are more and more connected to video recording tools, which allows a banker to easily make and send video messages.
In conclusion, we can say that FinTech is likely to continue to develop in the coming years, and will offer both challenges and inspiration for the financial sector.
Mark van Zon and Paul Geerts, KPMG Advisory
