EVENTS THE FINTECH TIMES
INDUSTRYINSIGHT MORE THAN 200 SPEAKERS REPRESENTING THE LEADING MINDS IN FINTECH WILL PRESENT AT FINTECH CONNECT 2023, INCLUDING...
JEREMY TAKLE, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF PENNYWORTH
BHAVNA SARAF, HEAD OF PAYMENTS PRODUCTS & PROPOSITIONS, SANTANDER
After building banks all over the world, Jeremy left a career at Barclays to found Pennyworth, a digital private bank for the aspiring affluent. The firm is on a mission to bridge the financial value and advice gap by bringing financial planning and banking together in one app, using open banking and AI to help people reach their financial goals.
In this newly created role, Seraph ensures that technology innovations translate into practical solutions for customers while delivering value to Santander’s shareholders. Prior to working at Santander, she worked at HSBC, Citi and Lloyds and has incubated and scaled a startup.
THE FINTECH TIMES:
What are you looking forward to at FinTech Connect? JEREMY TAKLE: FinTech Connect offers a great opportunity to hear lots of interesting people talk about what they’re doing and what’s at the forefront of their minds and what they think is happening in the industry. But more interestingly, it’s also the place to see what’s not being focused on and where those white or abandoned spaces are. Within fintech, there’s always a lot of ‘trends’ but these can suddenly move on and it’s almost as interesting to see what’s no longer on the agenda. TFT: What do you think are
the hot topics in fintech? JT: There are two hot topics for the upcoming year: AI, which is transforming various aspects of fintech, and wealth management, an area that still offers untapped opportunities for disruption. Wealth management has been slower to disrupt because it relies heavily on traditional advisors, making it more manual and less
digitised. There’s a significant gap between what people do with their banking and savings apps and what their advisors help them with. This gap presents a massive opportunity for innovation, especially among Gen X and Baby Boomer demographics. TFT: What challenges is the
fintech industry facing in the coming year? JT: One of the challenges in the fintech industry is the limited funding going into core financial services innovation. While there’s excitement around technologies like AI and quantum computing, they often focus on the periphery of finance. The core of finance, where traditional banks, insurers and wealth managers still dominate, remains largely untouched. Regulatory issues and the current funding cycle contribute to this challenge. I think there’s an opportunity for the fintech industry to focus in on research and development, and the reengineering of that core finance.
TFT: What are you looking forward
to at FinTech Connect this year? BS: I’m looking forward to networking with my FI peers and fintechs to compare notes on experiments and commercialisation that is taking place in the industry. Sometimes when you’re sitting in your own silo of a bank, you don’t get a window to see what else is happening in the market, so it’s always really nice to have in-person meetings where you can exchange questions and brainstorm solutions to the challenges we face in the industry. I’m particularly interested in gaining insights into customer problems that emerging technologies can solve. I’m also keen to hear about developments related to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), especially with the Bank of England at the event, to see how these technologies can be applied to legacy infrastructure. TFT: What are your thoughts
on the future of the fintech industry in the coming year? BS: I believe the fintech industry holds tremendous opportunities in
the coming year. The pace of innovation has been remarkable, with advancements in CBDCs, regulatory compliance, liability networks, stablecoins, open banking, NFTs and Web3. The key challenge is to harness these technologies to solve customer problems effectively. Being an entrepreneur myself and having had the founder journey, I’m all about experimentation as if you don’t experiment you don’t really know where the sweet spots are. But I am also interested in ensuring we put the necessary guardrails around to commercialise and scale any opportunity rather than just doing experiment after experiment. Innovations should address real customer needs and not just be solutions in search of problems. TFT: How do you view the role
of AI in the fintech industry? BS: AI, particularly generative AI, has enormous potential in fintech. However, to fully leverage this technology, we need to integrate it with legacy infrastructure effectively. Generative AI’s true power can be realised when we incorporate computational logic into it. This helps ensure that it can provide solutions with logic rather than just regurgitating information found on the web. While generative AI is promising, the challenge lies in applying it to legacy systems with disparate data sources. Balancing innovation with legacy constraints is crucial for successful integration. But I think it’s good to start getting our hands dirty and use it for some productivity experiments.
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