FinDEVr 2016: What’s Hot in FinTech?
By Kate for LTP
As the second day of FinDEVr 2016 comes to an end and attendants brush through business cards collected from interesting encounters, there are quite a few things one will certainly take out from the event.
From our experience of attending FinDEVr previous year, a shift in company profiles presented in 2016 has been quite noticeable. In 2016, substantial attention has been paid to RegTech (KYC), data analytics, machine learning, digital identity/authentication/security, APIs (long live APIs!), open source innovation and, of course, good old blockchain.
Let’s start with APIs – one of the most important tech pieces in the world of finance and beyond. FinDEVr 2016 has almost turned into an API festival as Envestnet by Yodlee, Alloy, DriveWealth, Hyperwallet, BBVA, Tango Card andMarqeta have dedicated attention and effort to building insanely useful for developers and business community APIs.
BBVA API Market has been one of the most exciting parts of the API discourse with the concept of the banking of the future – ‘APIfied’ bank. Shamir Karkal, the Head of Open Platform at BBVA has demonstrated how the Spanish bank transformed its capabilities to be able to support a full customer-facing bank purely based on financial APIs that are leveraging the established and firm capabilities of a solid bank.
Another interesting case with leveraging APIs is Tango Card, which offers a Rewards-as-a-Service (RaaS) API to make the incentive portion of reward and incentive programs easy.
The matter of building a reliable digital identity has also been one of the hottest topics as part of a bigger picture –cybersecurity. Companies like IdentityMind Global, Alloy, Kyckr, Entrust Datacard and BankGuard have been presenting solutions aimed to enhance opportunities for digital financial services without compromising the security.
SpeechPRO, a company offering a multimodal mobile biometric authentication solution has also been among innovators working to enhance the security of cross-industry solutions with biometrics. The company’s products are deployed to over 74 countries. SpeechPRO’s core expertise is speech recognition & text-to-speech, audio recording, forensic audio analysis, noise cancellation (audio enhancement) and biometrics (authentication, identification and verification).
It is needless to dig deep into the topic of blockchain-powered solutions as the distributed ledger technology remains an important part of innovative initiatives. Probably one of the most exciting presentations has been given by IBM, which invited developers to contribute and together leverage the opportunities presented by the Hyperledger project.
Overall, the experience of FinDEVr 2016 was largely filled by the great idea of open innovation and advantages of collaborative efforts of developers to enhance open source solutions. Although FinTech is a highly competitive environment, customer experience and journey along with seamless experience has been put at the center of attention.
In terms of customer experience enhancement, ABBYY has attracted our attention as one of the most experienced players with advanced OCR technology implementation to make personal budgeting and any sort of document/expense tracking frictionless. ABBYY products identify text, language, data, and relationships while transforming context into meaningful data. ABBYY solutions optimize mortgage processing, new account openings, accounts payable, accounts receivable, proof of identity, and proof of income solutions for leading global financial institutions.
Overall, in comparison to last year’s event, FinDEVr 2016 was about open innovation, open source and a collaborative approach to building advanced solutions. Machine learning and AI have played a special role in various presentations, but it is a little early to see ML having a central place in solutions enhancement.
First appeared at LTP
