On the Ground at the Singapore FinTech Festival
The much-anticipated Singapore Fintech Festival kicked off November 14th, drawing over 10,000 attendees from around the world, including financial institution executives, entrepreneurs, start-ups, government officials and members of the media.
During the week, I had a chance to attend several of the festival events, including The FinTech Conference. On the first day, Citi Global Consumer Banking CEO Stephen Bird took center stage in a panel discussion on "The Great Industry Debate: The FinTech Iron Throne." Stephen observed that the popular caricature that pits incumbent banks against financial technologies in a "winner-take-all" competition is too simplistic a view of the current, much less the future FinTech landscape. As opposed to a Darwinian fight to the finish, the two types of institutions can work together, combining the strengths of their differing strategic and competitive advantages. "Citi wants to become extraordinarily adept at integrating the best FinTech innovations or 'Fintegration' as the bank calls it," Stephen concluded.
He also addressed the question of how consumers' frame of reference has been formed by the user-friendliness of their respective apps, and discussed Citi's plans to become a mobile-first business. "Voice biometrics authentication is a good example of how we're working with new technologies to digitize our customer services, " he recalled.
I also attended the Hackcelerator Demo Day where Stephen served as a judge and presented the Citi Developer Hub award, granting $5,000 to "Beacon Interface" for an app that assists the visually-impaired with their banking needs.
Throughout the two-day conference, numerous attendees stopped by Citi's exhibition booth to learn more about our thought leadership and product innovation firsthand. With the Citi Developer Hub serving as the cornerstone, developers and partners demoed our capabilities, registered for our portal and experienced our local and global brand.
To learn more about the Citi FinTech strategy, launch of Citi Pay in Asia, and explosive growth of mobile app use in the region, watch Stephen's CNBC Asia and Bloomberg TV interviews.