Where in the world was nanopay this week?
As a global company, we attend events around the world. This past week Ivy Luu, Director, Cash and Liquidity Management Solutions, and Arnav Khurana, Director, Client Solutions & Business Development, were in Manchester attending the ACT Annual Conference. In this short blog, they share their insights and learnings from the event.
Q: How did this event compare to similar conferences you’ve attended?
Ivy: While the event brought together industry professionals from every corner of the globe, the event primarily consisted of sales professionals, with fewer domain experts. Personally, I would have liked to hear more from experts on their view of the industry as it evolves, and how they see treasury being disrupted by open banking specifically. While speakers, like journalist and news personality, Jon Snow (Channel 4), were well spoken, the event advertised that speakers would be domain experts.
Q: What were your highlights from the event?
Ivy: I found Martin Runow, from Barclays, particularly insightful. He spoke about Virtual Account Management platforms and focused on ‘pushing the boundaries of virtual banking’, providing detailed use cases. He really showed his depth of knowledge, and gave me an understanding of how others in the industry perceive our transformative technology.
Arnav: I quite enjoyed the speakers, but I also found the event was really well formatted for networking, with great post-event parties, Tom Holland’s (Spiderman actor) father performing stand-up comedy, and an overall atmosphere set for meeting new connections.
Q: Any surprises at the event?
Ivy: Both Barclay’s and HSBC admitted that they supported new solutions by partnering with fintechs. This was surprising, as both organizations are so powerful, but it really set the tone that moving forward, partnerships will be a crucial aspect to mature organizations being able to pivot and maintain their lead positions amongst global consumers. Fintechs may be viewed as a threat, and it was clear that banks feared new fintechs entering the space and potentially carving out revenue from traditional banking verticals, but it was also clear that even the largest banks now see the value in working with fintechs, rather than focusing on competition.
Q: What generated the most buzz around nanopay and its products?
Arnav: We got to meet with multiple international banks and they were all excited to learn about our proprietary Virtual Account Management (VAM) platform. We believe it is the best-in-class VAM and it’s nice to get that reassurance from the market.
Q: What were your top industry learnings or insights?
Arnav: One of the speakers, I can’t remember his name at the moment, talked about viewing new tech from an angle of “exploration”. His company actually does a company wide, semi-annual tech review, to see what new developments are being made in the market and where company could potentially make improvements. This means the whole company is thinking about the future, and constantly reviewing their current state. Of course, DATA is king these days, but data is no good unless companies take a moment to see how they can leverage the data to make better decisions.
