FinTech trends and wallet varieties. Key ideas learned from the industry experts.
Platio, by representation of its CFO Irina Berkon, participated in the FinTech on The Block conference in San Francisco organized by Katia Gaika, founder and CEO of Baza.one — Executive search and IT recruitment agency and Fintech on the Block conference.
The goal of the conference was to unite 3 worlds that we work with: the world of finance, IT and blockchain, so to foster possible synergies and partnerships among the participants of these fields.
“Along the way we came up with a notion of New Finance — an industry that unites Finance titans, Fintech companies and new tech (I.e. Blockchain) newcomers that disrupt traditional financial industry as we know it today” says Katia.
This turned out to be Platio’s sweet spot. Meeting people and discussing how FinTech is disrupting traditional finance, how blockchain is becoming a leading technology in the finance field and what the regulators have to say about it.
Irina lead 2 panels during the conference. The first one united FinTech trend setters, such as eToro, Consensys and Goodmoney. One of the takeaways related to the adoption of new technologies and the technical talent that cares about the impact of their work on the future of the industry. The panel was also eager to share the future implications of blockchain, specifically in FinTech. Particularly interesting insight of blockchain technology’s role was its ability to bring transparency, censorship resistance, lower friction, higher access, higher ROI on capital and liquidity to the industry. It was said that having social impact on the world resulting from proper application of FinTech disruption is going to be something we will see more and more in the future.
The second panel showed the spectrum of the crypto wallets, ranging from myCryptoWallet — a centralized exchange, Abra — a decentralized crypto wallet and Ledger — a cold storage wallet. The discussions related to the fact that in order for crypto currency storing to be secure, all 3 of these varieties have to exist and work together. “Be your own bank” was heard many times during the discussion and the panelists explained the trend and the requirement of the crypto users to be responsible for their assets.
Coincidentally, the winner of the pitching contest was a biometric device used for the maintenance of private keys.
“It was interesting to see that out of the 4 pitches judged by us, 2 were for products related to private key storage or recovery. Since Platio has its own solution for that, Asset Guard Standby Transfer, I was very happy with the attention this matter is starting to get” said Irina.
These were just a few of the panels and speakers featured at the conference. Relationships were made and fostered, thanks to the great organization and interesting topics discussed.
As Katia put it “Our takeaway: the conference proved our hypotheses, that this format is sought after by industrial leaders and that they all are grateful for the opportunity to have a chance to openly discuss difficult questions and new challenges that today’s tech presents”.
We thank Katia for inviting us and look forward to continuing our future friendship with her and the new connections we made at the conference.
