Program 2021

Nordics are known for having a collaborative business environment. Partnerships have helped startups to grow fasters and for incumbents to offer innovative technology and better customer experience. However, a lot of things were put up to a test last year including partnerships.

Tobias and Fredrik will talk about how a partnership between an innovative and modern bank and a reimagined data platform born in the cloud can challenge the traditional banks and become relevant to customers in a market dominated by both established actors and established solutions and software.

Tobias and Fredrik will discuss
– Why partnership between a bank and a software company?
– How to expect the unexpected and how to build your abilities of the future?
– Mistakes made and what were the lessons learned?

For some companies 2020 meant stalled funding rounds, paused contracts, little activity on new business development, while others were perfectly positioned to take more market share and win. For various reasons, companies can consider mergers as a strategy for growth. During the fire-side chat we will discuss what are the pros and cons for taking this path.

Open Banking has acted as a catalyst for mergers and acquisitions in financial services. During the panel we will discuss what is happening in the space right and what to expect from 2021.

For a long time, large corporations have enjoyed a near-monopoly on the superweapon of M&A. They used their access to capital and practiced M&A functions to eliminate competitors, enter new geographies and shorten development times. Today, the rise of venture capital & founders with M&A experience are helping startups strike back. Since 2017, startups have been growing their share of the global M&A market at 15% CAGR. Last year, startup investors participated in 3.3% of global M&A transactions–up from 2.2% in 2017. Our research shows that this trend will only accelerate in the near future.

While M&A and startup investing are prone to optimism that over-promises, our research shows that acquisitive startups have higher step-up valuations than their non-acquisitive peers.

We are in the middle of a new era for payments; a lot of developments in the last years, and a lot more to come. The choice is wider and the process of paying smoother, faster, and much more convenient than it used to be. Changeover to electronics further fuelled by the pandemic. The Riksbank bringing forward innovation in a number of projects.

With a growing number of countries that are renewing new domestic payment schemes to enable cross-border instant payments, the panel discussion on “Making instant cross-border payments a reality” would shed the light on where we are today in the Nordics. We will discuss the challenges and obstacles of the current infrastructure, how we envision cross-board payments in the future and what is the future role of the central bank in payment infrastructure vs commercial infrastructure.

The panel discussion on how Open Banking is paving the way for the digital transformation of payments will touch on where we are today. What is in place and what needs to be in place to take us to the next step of open banking? We will dive in the topic of payment initiation including how has SCA impacted the uptake an innovation.

Niclas will give an introduction and overview to the ongoing EBA ESG framework that are under development, based on the European Commission’s Action Plan on Financing Sustainable Growth.

Robert will give a quick intro to the new regulator framework of Loan monitoring and origination that enterers into force this summer.

What do you need to think of when building the bank for the future? Today customer experience is everything, and it needs to be delivered in a customized, personalized, and real-time manner.

A bank for the future – Experience is everything. Learn why Fredrik Ulvenholm believes superbanking-app is the next big thing and understand how you can be part of it.

Core banking solutions provide basic functions of every bank that is hidden from the end-users. On this panel discussion we will dive into how the new technologies would impact the core banking going forward. What is the potential for banks to adopt the mindset of collaborate culture when they can, and compete when they must?

Digital spin-offs: Independent, cost-effective, agile and lean. They have been on the rise in recent years, but the number of successful ones still remains modest. Join us, as we identify success factors for building a digital banking spinoff which can operate like a FinTech.

Together with Johan Westin we will discuss what are the trends in the digital transformation of core banking in the Nordics compared to the Asian market. And what role does the cloud play in the digital transformation of banking systems?

AI change is happening but are insurers prepared?
Seweryn will show that digital transformation for every insurance company is a key of importance to start experimenting with AI. In the Comarch short guide, three stages in the multi-level framework for digital transformation will be shown as well as what new technologies can be implemented.

The urgency to implement Blockchain and AI has been raised in uncountable industry conferences. In this panel, the question is not ‘if’ or
‘when’ but ‘how’ to lead an AI implementation project. Group Head of AI Strategy & Acceleration of a large bank, VP Industry of Product and Strategy of a provider that helps Incumbents modernise their backends and two CEOs of Insurtech that either implemented AI or are on the way to do so, will exchange their learnings.

Sharing best practices and avoiding challenges before they occur have always been at the DNA of Sthlm Fintech Week. In this panel, we would like to reflect if there is a holy grail on best practices in AI implementation of incumbents, technology providers or Insurtech companies.

Despite the 15k kilometres of distance between Stockholm and Sydney, the problems of the Insurtech ecosystem in Australia sound more than familiar.

Instead of complaining Simon O’Dell the co-founder of both Insurtech Australia (NGO) and Insurtech Gateway Australia (Accelerator) decided to go a step further. We will reflect on their investments into AI Insurtechs and wonder how a loyalty program from a supermarket chain impacts life insurance premium.

As the ecosystem’s problems sound familiar, maybe it is worth considering to implement similar solutions. Simon invests at one company at the time, supporting Insurtech teams to overcome high barriers to entry while connecting them across the ecosystem on two continents. After opening a second office in London, it feels that it would be high time for Sthlm to be next.

2020 was probably the most amazing year of all time for
cryptocurrencies. The landscape for bitcoin and decentralized finance
looks nothing like it did before. Eric Wall shares his updated
perspective as a deeply immersed industry and ecosystem participant on
what the world of cryptocurrency looks like in 2021.

Money legos is the term used to describe the way Ethereum allows different financial services to be plugged into each other, also known as composability.

DeFi, all hype and no substance or the future of finance? The panel discusses the current state of Decentralized Finance, its challenges and the future of DeFi.

In this keynote, Sian will discuss the transformative potential of RegTech. Drawing on the extensive research conducted by RegTech Associates, she will give a snapshot of where the industry currently is and some future trends to watch out for. Looking to the future, she suggests how all the actors – regulators, regulated firms and RegTech vendors – can do more together to secure the future success of the sector and unleash the true power of RegTech to keep the financial system safe and sound.

Christian and Heidi will speak about how to execute corporate governance effectively, organisations need to understand the ways culture influence business processes and decision-making processes.

The importance of good data has been around for a long time, this session will look at data in the context financial crime risk and what data is needed nowadays to drive the best outcomes in risk and compliance processes.

It is easy to underline that Fintechs, Incumbents should work together more extensively with Law Enforcement, but it is unclear which information should be shared to combat the dark side of Fintech and protect users more effectively.

On one side, Fintech companies are directly connected with customers and discover complex fraud waves quicker than law enforcement. Unfortunately, the legislator equipped Fintech companies with a possibility to report suspicious transactions instead of reaching out to domain providers to take down fraudulent websites together with law enforcement.

In this panel members of Fintech MLROs and Law Enforcement discuss the currently available knowledge-sharing platforms and their potential development to incorporate the growing Fintech ecosystem.

Does it feel like regtech is slowing down? What is holding up the adoption of new technology and how can we make it faster and less risky? This and more about opportunities that new technology and IT organizations can bring to add oxygen to already burning-hot industry.

It is no secret that COVID-19 constituted a tectonic shift for many aspects of how organisations operate. Before the pandemic, we talked a lot about the reluctance of financial institutions and other firms to proactively address inefficiencies of their compliance processes. Has this changed in the past year?

Firms find it harder to stay on the right side of the law, but financial organisations can get help from RegTech companies. Find out the dos and don’ts in the increasingly world of compliance.

Business cases of usage the Geolocation and Artificial Intelligence in AML in three different countries.

The focus of the “Trust in the Age of Digital Transformation” panel discussion is on how the increase in data traffic led to the rise of the trusted digital ID. The panelists would share their vision on the meaning of trust in the age of digital transformation and also touch base it from the cloud security prospective.

Knowing who you are doing business with online has been and still is a major challenge. But why do you really need to know, and what are the pitfalls? The presentation will look at some of the important challenges of identifying, validating and authenticating people online.

Mattias will give a keynote about the European Commissions work on fintech and digital finance. Why is a Digital Finance Package needed and what’s the upcoming legislative proposals targeting the fintech-sector?

This panel will discuss the development of fintech in EU from a legislative point of view. How has EU-regulations changed the market in the past and how is the coming regulations and initiatives going to change the market in the future? To answer these questions we have invited experts from the European Commission, European Parliament, the Swedish Bankers Association and the fast growing fintech-company Tink.

The Agency for Growth Analysis has released a report about the growing fintech-market, therefore we invited the policy analyst to present the report and a panel with the different actors in the fintech ecosystem to discuss the outcomes. What needs to be done to make Sweden the best fintech country in the world?