Web Summit 2017 is over. It’s the world’s biggest gathering of start-ups and investors. Some fledgling companies came to Lisbon, looking for business opportunities, others for investment, some to find a way to move to Lisbon. It is a big show and it is very good for Lisbon economy. More than 60,000 people, thousands of speakers, from entrepreneurs and executives from large organizations to Heads of state and government were here this week.
At the opening ceremony, Stephen Hawking talked about the future and advancements of humanity with the evolution of artificial intelligence. We will talk about Artificial Intelligence later in another post.
Crypto-currencies and Fintech still dominate the world’s largest start-ups event. Let’s focus a bit on Financial Services and technology called Fintech.
Traditional financial services providers are still faced with digitisation, cryptocurrencies, robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, cloud-computing and Big Data. Well, in short, Fintech is overhauling their systems and hence their businesses. Web Summit would aim at generating debate on what the future will look like, what clients are expecting, what providers of services need to do to survive, in which manner regulation will come into play, what challenges lie ahead for Banks and Fintechs…
Many of these questions are still unanswered even if a lot of speakers tried to bring responses during the week.
However, we see now a new trend in the Fintech world.
In the past, a Fintech Startup was focused on a single product (e.g. Payments, FX, Crowd Funding, peer to Peer Lending…). Some have realized that a customer was looking for more and it would be difficult to survive with one product.
A second wave of Start-up aggregating several services, is now attacking the market. MatchPlace is one of them.
The whole market gamut from payments to the capital markets trading, as well as trade finance and transaction banking is affected by the technology revolution.
Indeed, not only banks, but all other financial services providers from the first wave of Fintech are caught up in the whirlwind of technological advancement.
It is now easier to reduce costs of operations for the new Fintech players arriving on the market. It is moving fast. The “Fintech 2.0” bringing more aggregated services is already here.
In the past, Fintech start-ups were saying that they wanted to kill banks while banks were scared by the threat. Now, we hear that the banks want to collaborate with these Fintech start-ups while the Fintechs still claim that they offer a better service than the banks and that they are complementary with them.
MatchPlace is applying this new model providing a full range of services for SMEs.
At the end, the winner is the customer. Small and Medium businesses deserve a better service.
Benjamin Gedeon, CEO and Founder of MatchPlace
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More services on MatchPlaceFX: www.matchplacefx.com
