FinTech 5
April 6th, 2021
Brian Brooks, former Acting Comptroller of the Currency, delivered his keynote address “Are Banks Still Special?”, offering up valuable insight into the challenges and imperative of modernizing the U.S. financial system. Henny Sender, Managing Director at Blackrock, spoke on “Can Fintechs Disrupt the Dollar?”, and Jim Freis, former CEO of Wirecard, reflected on lessons learned from the Wirecard scandal. In addition to several highly topical expert discussion sessions, we also showcased 10 leading startups as a window onto tech and market developments in the sector.
Featured Startups
Keynote Address & Fireside Chats
Keynote Address
Brian Brooks discusses the evolving role of banks over the past several decades, the challenges and imperative of modernizing the U.S. financial system, what it will take to keep banks special, and much more!
Fireside Chat
Jim Freis and Stephen Scott discuss lessons learned from the Wirecard scandal.
Fireside Chat
Howard Chao and Henny Sender discuss the prospect of a legitimate alternative to the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
Discussion Panels
The State of InsureTech
Charles Svirk, Christopher Ewing, Snejina Zacharia, and Sean Harper discuss the state of insurance technology in early 2021.
Insurance technology companies raised $7.2B in 2020, with pace expected to exceed that in 2021. We saw large exits across the industry (Assurance IQ, Hippo, Lemonade, Metromile, Root) with a mix of M&A, IPOs, and added excitement in the SPAC space. What knock-on effect does this have for financings in the industry at all earlier stages? Is insurtech going the way of banking -- insurance as a service? How has the landscape for payment infrastructure, digital brokers and full stack carriers changed?
Regulatory Trends: Charting the Path Forward for Fintech
Alex Acree, Amy Friend, Andrea Mitchell, Troy Paredes, and Eric Sibbitt discuss regulatory trends as they relate to the fast evolving field of fintech.
The last decade has witnessed an explosion of innovation in payments, lending, crowdfunding, wealth management, embedded finance, crypto, and more. Regulation, however, has struggled to keep up. As we emerge from a year in which the pandemic accelerated the consumer and commercial adoption of fintech into a year that will be defined by a new administration setting its course, this panel discussed some of the most important regulatory trends shaping industry today, across consumer protection, banking, securities and capital markets.
Is Embedded Finance the Future of Financial Services?
Adam Shapiro, Mary Dent, Ryan Falvey, and Eric Sprink discuss the potential for embedded finance.
Until recently, Banking as a Service (BaaS) was mainly about enabling fintechs to offer bank-like services without being a bank themselves. Increasingly, innovative banks and BaaS platforms are working towards a future where non-financial companies can embed plug and play financial services into their products and services.
API Infrastructure: Building Fintech Products Today
Amias Gerety is joined by Chris Dean, Ayo Omojola, Rija Javed, and Leandra Fishman to discuss what it means to build a product using services delivered by API in Fintech today.
APIs are everywhere and everyone accepts that incorporating API-based tools (like Stripe and Plaid) or using API-based architecture (micro-services) are best practices. But what does it mean to actually build a product using services delivered by API, and what does it mean to build a company that sells services via API? This session includes perspectives across all parts of the value chain, product, operations, sales, and engineering to dig into the pressures and opportunities of an API-based ecosystem.