It’s past Memorial Day & we are in June, so that means Spring is officially over for the Northern Hemisphere. I am writing this light hearted article on major trends and takeaways from all the FinTech events I got to attend this Spring in SF. In this article I want to discuss how to maximize this blooming opportunity for networking, share new FinTech product launches, thoughts on current trends so you can incorporate it in your product roadmap.
Spring had sprung on FinTech conferences this 2024. Lately, I have come to believe that there are more FinTech conferences than there are FinTechs! 😀 Jokes apart, one good thing stemming from this is, there are many good FinTech events in San Francisco itself; you no longer have to go to NYC, London, Amsterdam, Singapore or Vegas etc to meet key folks driving innovation in Financial Technology. I urge you to take advantage of the TWiF local chapter, WiF local chapter or any conference hosted in your city (Money2020 - Las Vegas - Amsterdam - Singapore - Dubai etc, Empire State in NYC, FinTech Symposium in Chicago and many more).
This spring 📌 San Francisco hosted:
Stripe Sessions on Apr ‘24 at Moscone Center,
Visa Payments Forum on May 14th - 16th at Visa SF HQ,
Modern Treasury: Transfers ‘24 on 15th at The Midway,
Finovate Spring on May 21- 23rd at The Marriott Marquee
Some of these were literally on the same day overlapping with each other.
The offshoot of these conferences, especially multi day & large ones is that there are a ton of private dinners, happy hours, panels & 1:1s that happen given so many great minds are in town and locals reserving this time to take advantage of the opportunity. In my opinion, in order to make the best of it, it's important to make it to such events if you are available in the city.
Ancillary events:
WiF founder and VC panel at 3 Embarcadero
Ramp HH: Canvera Rooftop
Unit21 Risk & Compliance Leadership Dinner (An intimate dinner with Risk, Payments & Compliance leaders): The Cavalier
TWiF Happy Hour: 620 Jones
FinTech famously saw a big bust (Block, Marqeta, Toast down 80% form its peak in ‘21) right after the pandemic fever a.k.a froth of EVERYTHING IS FINTECH. However, we are seeing the resurgence of great minds building amazing FinTech products and funding is up as well.
Tl;Dr
Tech > Fin:
Maybe I am biased, but I personally like how Stripe and Modern Treasury events are run. It probably is in the ethos of Tech companies to run them efficiently, creating more opportunities to network & focus on the technical details. I personally enjoy talking to engineers and product leaders behind the new product rollouts. A great way to get the tech details, specs, product roadmap & architectural questions answered. Now, that satisfies the nerd and engineer in me.
Added bonus is a stellar lineup with great MCs (Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal Co-Founder & Co-Host, Acquired Podcast for MT Transfers| The Collisons themselves for Stripe Sessions) and a guest list such as - Jenson Huang (NVDIA CEO), Larry Summers (ex- Harvard President and Fed Chair), Ayo from Carbon Health, Jon CEO of Splitwise, Head of Product at ClassPass, Fidji Simo CEO of Instacart to name a few.
One day conferences > multi-day ones: I like Stripe Sessions 2023 more than 2024 for the same reason, and MT should keep Transfers to one day conferences as well. If you plan to meet others attending, then chances are more likely that people will pick one day Vs all 3. So you might miss out on meeting some of the important attendees who choose another day since dedicating 3 days to one event is not possible for all.
Networking (1:1s) > attending session:. The audience for these conferences skew a certain way. For e.g. Finovate more session goers than networkers. No doubt, there are some sessions worth attending, but most of these sessions can be accessed online later. Plus, depending on the interviewer and interviewee, a lot of their content and views are already expressed in podcasts, blogs etc so you are not learning anything new. Instead, I’d rather use that time to network, talk to the attendees and organizers alike to learn about their thinking behind a product, trends, headwinds, tailwinds etc.
Afterparties are equally important, if not more: Assuming you are already familiar with the FinTech scene, make the most of after parties/ancillary events & don’t skip them all. These will be attended by a rich subset of conference goers wanting to connect more informally 1:1 in-person, understand what you are offering or tell you more about what they are building etc. Checking the guest list, sponsor, and nature of the event etc will help in deciding which afterparties to attend. Choose your pick and go only for the ones with a rich signal to noise ratio.
Themes
AI & FinTech
There is a consistent trend of AI + Fintech. It boils down to:
We are still in the early innings of AI. It’s still figuring out its way in the content & image landscape, but we are hopeful that FinTEch is next.
It’s a no-brainer to start incorporating the power of LLMs in fraud and risk detection, early signals, pattern recognition etc.
Automation is the next frontier, but it’s not FinTech specific. Compliance is a Fintech adjacent area that does need paperwork, manual checks etc & that could be disrupted with AI.
As in any industry CS has already started embracing AI - Klarna released stats that ⅔ CS cases were handled by AI.
Similarly data from internal wiki, documents, onboarding processes are embracing AI to gain efficiency. Stripe uses AI internally for AEs to find quick links and answers to be shared with their accounts.
However, everyone always points out that in FinTech, it’s money that we are dealing with so no margin of error is good. The hallucination and low accuracy of LLMs are still an issue and therefore can’t be applied to FinTech’s core like lending decisions or money calculations/accounting etc as is. We can’t have any inaccuracies there; that part will be slower to adopt AI.
Risk and Compliance
With the growing regulatory environment, there are a lot of compliance startups helping with KYC, KYB etc. AI can definitely bring in efficiencies in onboarding, documentation standardization, document validation etc.
Risk already uses ML models in the risk rules. LLMs is a natural use case to enhance these. Models are constrained by a number of features that can be trained on but now with LLMs and more compute power even that constraint gets lifted. So among all FinTech areas, if anything Risk is going to benefit the most & going to see adoption very quickly as it already has
In a nutshell, AI plays a huge role in Risk decisioning, fraud models, feature building, automating manual flows, handling CS tickets and internal search, onboarding etc. AI yet to disrupt core money-movement decision making.
BaaS 👎Embedded 👍XBorder 📈and B2B FinTech in general
Need I say more about BaaS? The Synapse collapse was probably the last straw, and it’s in a precarious spot. Another reason to attend these in person, talk to industry insiders to know where the wind is blowing.
Embedded is still hot and going strong. A lot of founders are building in B2B2C or B2B space - companies include Kanmon, Parcha, Accend, Pave.dev, Sperta etc.
CrossBorder - At Unit21 leadership dinner, I learned that one of the ‘immigrant focused’ Xborder-FinTech for the Philippines now (planning on expanding to India and Mexico later) uses card rails & interchange from it to kickback to consumers. Typically USDC or stablecoins are used for XBorder to hedge the risk of any currency fluctuations & card fees that eat into the already thin margins. Not going to reveal the name of this Fintech, but you can guess. They are just getting started & after a strong foothold will be planning on moving to stablecoins/BitCoin etc.
Other Trends
Stripe decoupling add-ons from payments. Stripe is decoupling payments from all of its other augmented offerings like Radar (Risk and fraud check engine) etc. Jareau did a wonderful deep-dive of Stripe API in his newsletter Batch processing and my friend - Matt J regulatorynerd did an amazing tweetstorm detailing it. So dso check out the details there.
At an invite only dinner sponsored by Unit21, I was privileged to meet budding FinTech entrepreneurs as well as seasoned leaders. Two of them were ex-Paypal veterans now leading X Payments. One thing to keep an eye out is X. Who remembers the (in)famous Payments blank slide for Elon’s Twitter roadmap?
For those of us keeping a close eye on X Payments, we saw MTL licenses for X (f.k.a Twitter) in many states. As the saying in FinTech goes “Until you have California and NY state MTL licenses you don’t launch a solid FinTech/Payments product”. As of July 4th 2024 far X has 24 licenses. I learned from the dinner conversations that they are close to getting California and NY soon. Something BIG to be expected from X payments is all I can say. 🤐🤞
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Modern Treasury unveiled its AI powered reconciliation from unstructured and missing accounting records. That's a good way to incorporate AI to solve the reconciliation needs while closing your books ASAP, to get them ready for audit etc. I was able to talk to the PM and engineer working on this. The engineer is ex-Venmo, so it is good to have someone with prior domain knowledge. These in person meetings also help understand how they thought about the underlying infra and architecture, what features were prioritized & which are going to be a fast follow etc. Watch the demo here
If you want to experience this in person & take advantage of this bloom but are at a loss where to get started, Bruno from Plaid has a great inventory here on all FinTech events happening around the globe..
If in-person is not for you then there are a lot of great sources on SM and Substack that can synthesize the trends for you. Some of my favorites are:
X (f.k.a) Twitter: Matt Janiga regulatorynerd, Bruno Werneck de Almeida. FinTech curated X list
TWiF - This week in FinTech
Substacks: Batch Processing, Fintech Takes, Jason Mikula’s newsletter
LinkedIn: Marcel , Everything FinTech, Getting payments Visa’s newsletter