THE FINTECH REVIEW 2024. ARE WE GETTING TIRED OF ALL THIS TECHNOLOGY?

We ask a simple question. Has there been any movement at all in our use or exception of technology in our financial markets? And if so… where?

Or maybe we are looking at this wrong. Perhaps we should be turning the telescope round and saying ‘not what can technology do for us – but rather ; what can we do, with the technology that there is”? I’m sure someone else has said something like that before.

And it’s a tricky one. Because it pigeon-holes us. And far from widening our view and our expectation, we become encapsulated in our view and our expectations. The recent Article by Tom Abrams, Associate Director for Deep Sector Content at FactSet, and Nina Piper, Vice President, Director of Strategy and Product Development for the Cognitive Computing group at FactSet, – is comprehensive in its assessment. But is was written in July 2023, some 18 months ago, and it is still publicly downloadable.

Sure – people are learning that AI can help them to fire their staff, I mean, It’s not as effective – but who needs to employ staff when a machine can generate your media or code “almost” as effectively, at far less cost? But as we ourselves found throughout the four Fintech conferences we covered across 2024, the same hesitation and confusion as to outcomes, is still prevalent.

Yet that perception may be wrong, and in ways that people are only now coming to understand. It may well be that we are simply looking in the wrong place for our fintech next steps.

It is almost Christmas here in 2024, and I am alighting the Elizabeth Line tube stop at Custom House. The London EXCEL Trade Fair centre, can not be remotely be described as having anything to do with latest financials, or the tech that makes it happen. For too long, planted on the wrong side of Canary Wharf, it has been the venue of choice for pretty much every trade event that was not fashionable – it was for the worker bees, not the elevated few.

Or at least, it used not to be. The Elizabeth Line has changed all that of course.

Now, just two or so stops, whisks you from your glass towers at Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street, direct into Canary Wharf and then onto Custom House – in less time than it takes a busy trader to pop out and get a cappuccino.

Suddenly, – the Excel has adopted a new more upbeat identify, Sure – it cannot escape its original raison d’être – the proximity across the Thames to the City Airport, the drab and functional walkway from the DLR into an ordinary set of automatic entrance doors – and a vast series of separate Halls for the many. But it is now connected, to the two richest tube stops in London, that make it a viable point of presence for this latest Fintech., where I am heading. Connected, is the right word.

The problem is tho – that across all of 2024 and even from the embers of 2023, every financial conference was in many ways saying the same message – that AI , and Transformation, were good things. And that Cyber, – well, we didn’t know what to do about that, – but it wasn’t a good thing really. They were also saying that not many corporations were actually doing much about any of those topics. There was a confusion.

But then again – all of those past events, were closeted in high rise venues, nice escalators, almost philosophical in their ambience, peer to peer, networking.

This final conference of the year – Fintech Connec! is none of those things. It is obvious as soon as you dab your QR code on the auto registration, and see that there are no tables of free food and beverage and hospitality – that this is indeed a workers day out, – we are here for a reason. This is the practical roll-out of concepts that we have been discussing earlier on for the past twelve months.

It is not the lack of hospitality, the lack of being valued or looked after, that is the difference. It is that the questions people ask – have moved on.

Suddenly, we are talking about “people”, as opposed to “tech”. Christy Duncan strides on to the stage, microphone in hand, apologising for her heavy cold; she talks about the mass migration of peoples, particularly around Europe – that has changed the pillars of how things had been working. Other speakers talk about the “empathy” of future AI.

Are you kidding?

It gets better; there is a perceptible movement towards the increasing use of large scale mathematics, to deliver the solutions that can make a proper difference in our real world.

In short – we are moving away from technical discussion almost for its own sake, in the absence of technology that can deliver a human benefit – towards ironically a deeper technology that is aimed at what people want.

It will be difficult to see in these early days of 2025 – how the US market will influence us. But it may be not at all. There is an increasing awareness of the need for a more European integrated approach. Let’s look again in six months. Looking back on where we have come from, may well be the philosophy that can define us for the future. Sartre would have been proud.

RICHARD BLOSS IS MANAGING EDITOR AT THE PROFOMEDIA AND CRT PARTNERSHIP.

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