Financial Services Club Season Q4 2016

I don't often highlight the Financial Services Club's forthcoming meetings, but felt it worth just noting a few upcoming specials.  Join the Club if you want to come along:

Financial Services Club England

September 6

Future Applications of the Blockchain Technology - Leanne Kemp, Founder and CEO, Everledger

September 20

The Refugee Crisis is also an Identity Crisis - Jaz O'Hara, Founder, The Worldwide Tribe

September 28

Reaching the Digital Consumer - Clinton Bell, Customers First Now

October 5

The Landscape for Financial Services post-Brexit - The Rt Hon John Redwood MP

October 19

PSD2, Open APIs and the opportunity to reduce payment fees - Stephen Lemon, Co-Founder, Currency Cloud

October 27

Innovation trends in Commercial Banking - Richard Davies, Global Head of Propositions, HSBC Commercial Banking and Conrad Ford, Founder and CEO, Funding Options

November 17

Innovating the World's Second Oldest Profession - Sam Maule, Head of Digital / FinTech, NTT Data Consulting

Financial Services Club Poland

September 26

PSD2, Open APIs and the opportunity to reduce payment fees - Weronika Rudnicka, Management Consulting Manager, Accenture and Stephen Lemon, Co-Founder, Currency Cloud

December 1

Making tea on the blockchain - Michael Salmony, Executive Adviser, Equens

Financial Services Club Norway

October 13

PSD2, Open APIs and the opportunity to reduce payment fees - Kristian T. Sørensen,  Partner, Norfico and Tim Richards, Principal Consultant, Consult Hyperion

September 6

Future Applications of the Blockchain Technology

Leanne Kemp, Founder and CEO, Everledger

How many opportunities does the Blockchain present to improve and build on our existing systems, and what new areas does it open to us?  A well-known innovator, Leanne will give us her view on what possibilities the Blockchain opens to us and what the long-term ramifications of the technology behind Everledger could be.  Using all her experience and foresight, Leanne will share with us:

• New ideas that could revolutionize finance and enterprise
• What the limits of the technology are
• How the Blockchain can improve our existing systems
• What the future could hold for your institution

Leanne Kemp is the founder & CEO of Everledger. Everledger provides an immutable ledger for diamond identification and transaction verification for various stakeholders, from insurance companies to claimants and law enforcement agencies.

September 20

The Refugee Crisis is also an Identity Crisis

Jaz O'Hara, Founder, The Worldwide Tribe

Social media changed Jaz's life, and the lives of thousands of people she works with.  Not to be underestimated as a tool for procrastination, Jaz O'Hara demonstrates the power of Facebook and Instagram (and other channels), not just through her own crazy story, but through several inspiring examples of the refugees she works with in camps across Europe and the Middle East and how they have been impacted by this amazing resource we all have at our fingertips!  In under a year, Jaz went her job in fashion in London, to sleeping in a tent in a refugee camp in Northern France, to speaking at the UN headquarters in New York, all after a post she wrote about her first experience visiting a refugee camp in Calais, known as the Jungle, went viral.

Now Jaz is not only campaigning or to highlight the humanity behind world issues, inspire global community and leave a legacy of positive, social change, but also working with the United Nations to solve Humanitarian Goal 16.9: "By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration".  This involves developing inclusion through technology, and a key part of this will be some form of digital identity program.  That will be the focus of tonight's inspirational presentation and discussion.

September 28

Reaching the Digital Consumer

Clinton Bell, Customers First Now

Customer experience is the most powerful differentiator and driver of sustainable revenue growth in financial services, and that experience is now completely digital.  Delivering a powerful and differentiated digital user experience offers both challenges and opportunities.  This Club meeting will explore how the banking and financial services sector can make the best use of digital platforms, social media and data analytics to engage with their customers and grow revenues.

Clinton Bell is an advocate for putting the customer at the heart of a business and Customers First Now is an international customer experience company, with a strong track record in banking and financial services.  Clinton has worked in corporate and SME environments in the UK and Spain with clients including NatWest, HSBC, Bank of England, Lloyds, Barclays, IBM, Oracle, Virgin, Grant Thornton and Fast Money Pay.

October 19

PSD2, Open APIs and the opportunity to reduce payment fees

Stephen Lemon, Co-Founder, Currency Cloud

The growth of the cloud has steadily been transforming the way business is done, with legacy systems across sectors finding themselves pushed to one side. Few industries are seeing this shift more dramatically than fintech.

The transformation is seeing the rise and rise of new platforms and services offering new ways of working. One of London’s leading fintech providers now doing just that is Currency Cloud.

At its heart, Currency Cloud offers cross-border payments as a service.

Any organisation providing payment services can benefit from the CC platform. These include small banks, FX brokers, payments companies, e-commerce businesses, financial institutions, online and mobile payment providers, pre-paid card providers and digital currency exchanges.

Stephen Lemon is Co-Founder of Currency Cloud, which he established in 2009.  He is now Vice President of Business Development as well as a Non-Executive Board Member of Synops and Currency Transfer.  Before founding Currency Cloud, Steve was a co-founding member at “old-school retail brokerage” HiFX, where he was in charge of private client business. From there Lemon moved on to co-found Indigo Recruitment, which specialised in finding talent for foreign exchange and financial industry positions.

October 27

Innovation trends in Commercial Banking

Richard Davies, Global Head of Propositions, HSBC Commercial Banking

Conrad Ford, Founder and CEO, Funding Options

Over the past years most efforts to make the banking user experience better have been focused on retail customers. However, this is moving upstream to business clients and has become one of the main areas for innovation. Companies are looking how to become more efficient and are expecting banks to help them by using technology in a smart way. In this session, we will hear the views from both a big corporation and fresh start up to understand how the different entities are applying innovation.

Richard Davies is the Global Head of Propositions at HSBC Commercial Banking, responsible for driving strategic change for both SME and Corporate customers, with a design led focus on digital, innovation, and client experience. Prior to that role, Richard was the Chief Operating Officer for UK Commercial Banking, having joined HSBC in August 2014. Prior to joining HSBC, Richard was CEO of a new entrant challenger bank (OakNorth), and successfully led the business model development, regulatory licence submission, and operations and technology design to enter the UK SME banking market. Previously, Richard was a Managing Director at Barclays Corporate, worked at Lloyds TSB in Retail Banking Strategy, and at L.E.K. Consulting covering a range of financial services sector projects. Richard has a MA Economics and M.Phil Development Economics from Trinity Hall Cambridge.

Conrad Ford, founder and chief executive of Funding Options, an award winning online finance intermediary. Funding Options helps UK businesses access the funding they need by using unique technology to individually analyse the funding needs of each small business and connect them with their finance options.  With a background as a chartered management accountant at latterly in the group strategy team of Barclays, Conrad created this fast-growing technology funding business. He wanted to create the go-to service that any business could use when they need to access finance, removing one of the major barriers in the UK economy. Funding Options is a previous global finalist in SWIFT's Innotribe Challenge for promising FinTech companies, and in the Spring 2016 Budget was recommended by HM Treasury to receive mandatory SME finance referrals from major UK banks.

November 17

Innovating the World's Second Oldest Profession

Sam Maule, Head of Digital / FinTech, NTT Data Consulting  Inc

Sam Maule is rated as one of the best speakers in the FinTech community and he brings years of hands-on experience in banking (and with the US Navy), as well as a great sense of humour, to his presentations.  He is a sought after American presenter and an active voice in the FinTech Social Media space, and has been named as one of Bank Innovation's Coolest Brands 2015, recognized by LeadTail and BrightIdea study as one of the top ten Twitter accounts that Innovators follow (2015), recognized by Onalytica and Jay Palter as one of the Top 100 #fintech influencers (2015); and named as one of the top 30 Innovators to Watch 2014 and 44 Executives Shaping the Future of Banking 2013 by Bank  Innovation.

In his main role, Sam serves as the Head of Digital / FinTech at NTT Data Consulting, Inc and recently joined the Digital Finance Institute as the Chief Inspiration Officer (CIO) focusing on financial inclusion for the unbanked globally.

He joined NTT Data Consulting in June 2011 focusing on the Cards & Payments Community of Practice. In this role, Sam provides industry subject matter knowledge and experience to CG’s Financial Services clients in support of projects such as Consumer and Commercial Card portfolio management, emerging payments, Loyalty & Prepaid, and digital/mobile banking.

Prior to CG, Sam held management positions with TSYS in a number of Consumer and Commercial Card roles to include digital card management, mobile, loyalty & prepaid and consultative services. These positions were focused both on domestic and international clients and included several years living abroad in the UK in support of the TSYS Europe Client base.

Financial Services Club Poland

September 26

PSD2, Open APIs and the opportunity to reduce payment fees

Weronika Rudnicka, Management Consulting Manager, Accenture

Stephen Lemon, Co-Founder, Currency Cloud

The Payment Services Directive (PSD) revision being implemented on or before 12 January 2018 in most EU member states creates a small headache for banks, namely Open APIs.  This means that any Trusted Third Party (TTP) can have access to a bank customers data.  What does this mean in practice?  To find out, two leading lights in PSD and API usage are presenting to the Polish Financial Services Club to give deep insights.

Weronika Rudnicka leads the PSD activites for Accenture and will present the nuts and bolts of how this regulation is going to change the payments strucutres of banks in Polanbd and across the EU.

Stephen Lemon is Co-Founder of Currency Cloud.  The growth of the cloud has steadily been transforming the way business is done, and seeing the rise and rise of new platforms and services offering new ways of working. One of London’s leading fintech providers now doing just that is Currency Cloud.  At its heart, Currency Cloud offers cross-border payments as a service.

December 1

Making tea on the blockchain

Michael Salmony, Executive Adviser, Equens

A new algorithm is entrancing the world of finance. The energy unleashed to challenge all existing solutions (from cross-border payments to post-trade securities settlement) and improve them is wonderful. But is Blockchain really new? More importantly: is it any better than the methods we had before? Should we business people even be talking about algorithms ? Are some of the basic premises – like wanting to get rid of a central arbiter – really a good idea ? Maybe the new champions just want to position themselves as the new central points of control ! How would a fully distributed system work in the real world – especially since the basic algorithm does not seem scalable, uses inordinate amounts of energy and is even surprisingly bad at privacy ?

Can one tweak the blockchain to make it more efficient, adhere to regulations like AML/KYC without losing all advantages ? Or are we all just following the latest hype and will end up discovering that Blockchain is only for idealists (or criminals) intent on bypassing banks and central authorities ? Maybe Blockchain really only is good for making tea.

The speaker – who studied Computer Science and spent many years at IBM managing the evolution of distributed solutions without blockchain – muses on hype versus reality and the tendency for our sometimes lemming-like behaviour. A reality check is offered on how to use the energy unleashed in the Blockchain debate to solve real problems in a practical way.

Financial Services Club Norway

October 13

PSD2, Open APIs and the opportunity to reduce payment fees

Kristian T. Sørensen,  Partner, Norfico

Tim Richards, Principal Consultant, Consult Hyperion

Chris Skinner, CEO, The Finanser

Iren Tranvag, Founder, Nordic Finance Innovate

The Payment Services Directive (PSD) revision being implemented on or before 12 January 2018 in most EU member states creates a small headache for banks, namely Open APIs.  This means that any Trusted Third Party (TTP) can have access to a bank customers’ data.  What does this mean in practice?  To find out, two leading lights in PSD and API usage are presenting to the Polish Financial Services Club to give deep insights.

Kristian T. Sørensen, Founding Partner of Norfico

Kristian’s work within financial services has made him an acknowledged fintech thought leader and a frequent speaker at conferences worldwide.  Prior to joining Norfico, Kristian served four years in various strategic positions within Nets, where he led the strategic development related to Nets’ mobile services across the Nordic countries as well as advising Nordic banks about the strategic options for mobile payments.

Since 2010 Kristian has participated in Mobey Forum - the leading global association for mobile financial services, and has been an active contributor to the production of Mobey Forum’s mobile wallet and HCE white papers. He was elected to the Board of Directors in 2012.   Before Nets he worked for the Danish Bank Nykredit moving from managing online banking, over mobile banking to mobile payments.  Kristian also served as member of the Danish Bankers’ Association’s Mobile Working Group. Here, he partook in designing the first Danish attempt for a national mobile payment solution in 2011.

Kristian holds a master’s degree in Communication and Psychology.  See more on LinkedIn and follow Kristian on Twitter.

Tim Richards, Principal Consultant, Consult Hyperion

Tim Richards is a technologist and behavioural psychologist who started out working on the first generation of GSM mobile phones and has survived in the industry long enough to discover a use for most of the features he designed.  He helped design the electronic purse Mondex, the smart card operating system Multos and some of the original EMV solutions and has since amassed over 25 years’ experience designing secure smart card solutions across payments, mobile, transit, identity, passport, healthcare and loyalty solutions.  He currently runs Consult Hyperion’s issuance practice, advising clients on an area currently focussed on mobile payments, mobile transit and tokenisation.