Money20/20 Europe: creating safe spaces – platforms and collaboration
Money20/20 Europe: roll up folks
Open banking, cloud, collaboration and innovation; all themes that crop up again and again in any fintech discussion. The vision of an open, agile and customer-centred future is appealing but as any fintech or financial institution will tell you, the reality if far less smooth and full of stumbling blocks.
During a conversation with Steve Wozniak at Money20/20 Europe, the audience was asked to vote for what they felt were most important topics at the conference. The rise of technology platforms come out on top, followed by collaboration between fintechs and financial institutions.
So, marrying the vision of an open and collaborative future is where real innovation comes to fruition. As Martin Haering, CMO at Finastra, noted when launching FusionFabric.cloud at the conference this morning, the majority of innovation will not happen within large financial institutions and fintechs will continue to find it hard to deliver innovation into them. The platform aims to bridge that gap and create a space for collaborative innovation and creation.
Finastra will, through FusionFabric.cloud, open its entire software stack to the outside world. The cloud-based platform aims to both enable and accelerate collaboration. Innovators will be able to create products and services leveraging the technologies that are actually running a large number and broad range of financial institutions, the vendor says. That openness will also include the integration of large third-party applications (e.g. IBM Watson) and aims to be a one-stop-shop for co-creation and, crucially, allows for access to a sales platform to sell into the end-users.
“FusionFabric.cloud offers developers and other industry stakeholders access to a broad platform that will, ultimately, define standards for the industry,” Haering says. “Finastra’s role in that ecosystem is as an enabler given that most innovation happens elsewhere and a recognition that you can’t always be the smartest person in the room.”
Large tech providers to the industry are not immune from transformation and creating pathways between innovators and their own customer base seems like good strategy in a fast-evolving landscape. The platformication of everything continues and large tech companies must be part of that process.
By Lisa Moyle, director of strategy, fintech, & director of partnerships at FinTechTalents
