Four days in Davos — FinTech, FOMO and the future
Last year TransferWise was named a Tech Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. It was a big honour for our whole team. As a result, I was invited to the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos and spent most of the week before last there.
The whole experience was pretty surreal. I spent the days listening to some of the world’s foremost experts on everything from economics to AI and meeting with CEOs of companies from the banking to leisure sectors. On the first night, I met two of my personal heros, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg. In a matter of hours in one afternoon, I listened to Christine Lagarde speak, (literally) bumped into the UK Chancellor George Osborne in the corridor, and then sat next to Matthieu Ricard as we both took advantage of a quiet moment to catch up on emails.
Celebrity-spotting is pretty standard at Davos. It’s one of the things that makes it easy to criticise.
A DAVOS BUBBLE
There’s most definitely a Davos bubble. You’re in a small Alpine town that for just four days in January sees its population tripled with world leaders, CEOs, media, police, the army… and a whole bunch of people who aren’t invited but just come to hang out. There’s the Annual Meeting itself within the secure zone of the Congress Centre itself. Then there’s the ‘fringe’: corporates take over local shops and cafes to host their own ‘pop-ups’. And then there’s the evening schedule: the nightcaps, the dinners, the private parties… The rumours that Kevin Spacey was singing karaoke spread like wildfire. There’s the risk of a serious case of FOMO at a place like Davos.
There’s always been a lot of interest in the tech community about how to foster innovation and creativity — both within a company but also in the ecosystem of a tech cluster. In both cases, creating opportunities for people who don’t encounter each other normally to meet and talk is key. When that happens — when we’re taken out of our comfort zone and talk to people who approach things completely differently, the potential for innovation increases.
That’s kind of what happens at Davos. I met with CEOs from companies and organisations I would never normally see and from sectors completely different from the one I work in. And whether it’s the Alpine air or because we’re all out of our natural environment, the discussions were surprisingly open and direct. I don’t know if the same happens for the world leaders — I hope it does.
FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
This year’s theme was the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s something that those of us in tech companies have been focused on for over a decade now: the surge in disruption driven by technology in all sectors that is changing how we live. It struck me that we’ve reached the transition from early adopter to late majority. For the people who go to Davos to be discussing these issues means we’ve reached a moment of transformation. It’s time that governments react to the changes we’re seeing: disruption of this scale in every sector requires disruption in our socio-economic institutions too. It’s right that we think about what the impacts are — the risks as well as the benefits. And that should drive us to find better solutions.
Carlota Perez put it better than I could — this is actually the fifth industrial revolution. It has the potential to reduce the inequality and make the world a better place.
And then it’ll be time for the next revolution.
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