4IRE was featured at Stockholm FinTech Week 2020

Sthlm Fintech Week hosted a five-day conference gathering the best of fintech from across the Nordics.

Recently our partners were attending Stockholm FinTech Week from 10th till 14th of February.

The conference was supported by a number of companies. The events took place at the offices of SEB Bank, Acuminor, KPMG, and in spaces of Epicenter, Invest, Downtown Camper, and Impact Hub.

The 4ire Labs team was pleased to be a part of such a community-driven Fintech event.

The first day was addressed to Public Fintech Initiatives & Regulations. Speakers discussed how fintech could be regulated and involved in governmental systems.

One of the topics was how Regtech can ensure compliance, and enable business in the areas of GDPR, Account Opening, Cloud Computing, Open Banking, and more across various industries.

The second day was devoted to the Insurtech topic. One of the session attendees focused the discussion on the Swedish disruption dilemma: Insurtech and Direct Insurers. Few speakers highlighted the problem of financial crime and ways to resolve it.

On the third day, we discussed AI in Fintech, as it’s one of the most important topics nowadays. One of the subtopics in the AI track was the role of AI in commercial banking.

Our partner, Max had opened the DeFi discussion panel, providing the latest updates, stats, and trends in the Decentralized Finance. Here you can watch the full video.

The fourth day was the Main Day of Stockholm Fintech Week. Participants were discussing the future of payments overall along with some specific topics such as Nordic KYC, Open Banking, and Digitalization. The biggest part was focused on FinTech collaboration and real cases.

The last day was called FinTech Safari. During the entire day, partners had the possibility to create dedicated workshops for community members and participants of the Sthlm Fintech Week.

The main goal of the workshop, presentation, seminars, and roundtables was a deeper knowledge exchange within the topics covered during the whole Sthlm Fintech Week.

We were excited to participate in this event as speakers. It was a great experience that gave us many insights.

Here are some keynotes we’d like to share with you

1. The largest banks initiated a P27

P27 is a company owned by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Nordea, OP Financial Group, SEB, and Swedbank. P27s vision is to break down barriers for trade and financial interaction between the Nordic countries. P27s mission is to make payments more efficient in the Nordic currencies and the Euro with a payment infrastructure for domestic and cross-border payments. An open-access and common infrastructure will bring further harmonization to the European payments landscape.

The platform will deliver a state-of-the-art payment experience to customers across the Nordics, as well as provide a foundation for future developments.

Preliminary, the P27 should start its work by the year 2021. VCs are ready to invest in startups and small companies

As we’re at the age of great technological changes and innovations, investors are ready to support projects and give them investments. But there are few things among others that are important to VCs.

• The team with wide expertise and a deep understanding of the industry.
• The ability of monetization.
• Projects that might be interesting and useful for customers or partners.

2. Regtech companies are growing

The topic of RegTech is becoming more popular every day. Many companies are trying to analyze the market and its specifics. Blockchain technology is deeply integrating into the RegTech community. Insurtech companies are trying to use smart contracts in their workflow. AI and Data Science are also in great interest. The main issue is with Data privacy, security, and compliance as not every type of information can be used with the technologies mentioned above.

3. Lithuania keeps up with the latest fintech trends

According to reports, Lithuania is ranked in Europe’s top 10 fast growth capitals. It is also a leading country in Europe that creates attractive conditions from the regulatory perspective for the leading Fintech startups and companies. Sustainable Finance is growing in the EU and government authorities in Lithuania are strongly supporting this area. Listen to the speech of the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania at Sthlm Fintech Week on LinkedIn.

4. E-Krona project by The Riksbank

The Riksbank decided to promote a safe and efficient payment system, as cash is no longer used as a means of payment by the majority of households and companies. The Riksbank, therefore, needs to consider which role it should adopt in an evermore digital world. As part of this, we started a project in spring 2017 to examine the scope for the Riksbank to issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC), a so-called e-krona.

An e-krona would give the general public access to a digital complement to cash, where the state would guarantee the value of the money. At present, the Riksbank only offers banks and other RIX participants digital money. The other digital money in society is private bank money issued by commercial banks.

There are still a lot of consequences that may lower the speed of development: regulatory problem, licensing is too expensive, lack of well-qualified resources, high taxes. But we believe that everything will be solved.

5. Lack of Blockchain MBA programs

Although many companies are interested in blockchain development and this technology is in high demand, there is still a lack of information. A lot of product owners and analysts are looking for more information regarding blockchain, but there is no source to get it.

As we can see, technologies and innovations are developing and growing, there are still a lot of blind spots and controversial issues. But such events are definitely helping a lot of companies in different industries. This event also inspired us to found the FinTech Innovation Network, where we publish researches on using innovative technologies, problems in the FinTech industry with great contributors and experts. Here is how the map of the FinTech Ecosystem looks like. ( the interactive map available on Graph Commons).

Discover more about the FinTech Innovation Community and public researches on WIKI.