I felt quite lucky, when I got the news that I’ll be joining Dorsum’s Money20/20 team this year. This was about to be my first international event attendance, and it’s on the biggest FinTech stage of Europe. Not incidentally – the event is taking place in Amsterdam, a city I’m in love with. I’ll have to hold myself back not to go on a half-page frenzy about everything I love about this place, but just allow me to mention how amazingly lovely, how diverse but undivided, and how tolerant the people of this city are. And, of course, I’m also amazed by the buildings, the canals, the food – just the entire environment astonishes me. But let’s get back to the subject of my article. I arrived 2 days before the rest of the team to set up and prepare our booth for the exciting 3 days that were ahead of us. Incalculable people were busily finishing the final touches on their booth inside the giant halls of the RAI when I arrived at the venue. Thankfully everything went smoothly for us, so I had some time on my hands to enjoy Amsterdam before an extremely busy 3 days.
I was overwhelmed when I stepped into the venue for the first time Monday morning. Here I am, along the greatest and most influential minds of banking and technology. I walked to our booth gaping at some of the most interesting solutions these amazing companies have come up with. After the team arrived, I had some time to walk around, check out the newest FinTech ideas and achievements, and of course, try to collect as many fun giveaways to take home as possible. The vast majority of the exhibitors were in payment, fraud-prevention and identification related fields, and surprisingly, only a small number of wealth management and blockchain topics were to be found.
I spent quite a lot of time at our booth welcoming those interested in what we do at Dorsum, and I have to say, I had a really good time getting to know and talking to a number of fascinating and inspiring people. Most of our visitors were executives of other FinTech companies looking for ways to broaden their offerings and build powerful partnerships. We also had some interest from incumbent banks – it was really nice to see them looking for ways to step their digital game up. It was truly exciting to showcase what we’ve been tirelessly working on over the last year and to try and find opportunities to even better our solutions with interesting cooperation possibilities.
Our booth had some screens from our new My Wealth (Wealth Portal) app, and according to my observations, most people who came and talked to us after just browsing between booths or walking by got their interest raised by those images. Also, our Wealth Platform was a success with people who were interested to watch a live demo – it was really nice to see the result of such a long and challenging product development.
Because I was usually attending our booth to welcome anyone interested in our solutions, I didn’t spend much time at the stages – although … I was however lucky enough to attend a panel on the Innovation Catalyst Stage on Building a bank from licencing to user experience. It was absolutely interesting and thought-provoking to hear a compelling idea on how incumbent banks can compete with challenger banks – by building their own challenger bank subsidiary from scratch, separated from the bank, with exclusively digital and online solutions, with independent IT systems and a narrow service scope, but utilizing the existing knowledge of the bank.
The greatest takeaway for me from the event was a quite positive encounter – incumbent banks seem to have started heading down the road of massive digitalization. On the other side, regarding investment and wealth management services, they are still clearly at the very beginning of their long journey. But I believe this is what we’re here for at Dorsum – to guide them on this lengthy and serpent-like passage.
Also, let me shout out to the organizers – not only was everything running smoothly during the event, but they truly did everything to make these 3 days amazing and memorable. From the amazing food selection at the event, to the nightly event, it couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience for us. I had the most fun at the Welcome Party on Monday night, where we got to try a selection of the best street foods of Amsterdam, and some high-end drinks to wash it all down.
Let me also thank the Money20/20 team for taking me with them, and for the fun days and nights we had during our stay.
Written by Ákos Szalay.