3 minute read
A virtual feast
A feastvirtual
Sanjib Kalita, Editor in Chief at Money20/20, reflects on industry changes in Europe and the US as the international payments conference goes online
What promises to be one of the most compelling virtual speaking slots of what’s already tagged an ‘unmissable’ fintech event, takes place on the first day of Money20/20’s MoneyFest.
In Lessons From An Economic First Responder, Jill Castilla, president and CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond, Oklahoma, who was voted one of the most powerful women in banking by American Banker magazine earlier in the month, tells how the bank mobilised to put its community on financial life support during COVID.
In a suburb of Oklahoma City with a high proportion of small retail businesses and contract employees, Castilla believed her bank had to put ‘doing the next right thing’ ahead of day-to-day business, and teamed up with fintech to protect as many as it could from financial hardship. In three working days it had figured out a way to short-circuit government stimulus payments and provide upfront relief quicker. In 10 days, it had partnered with Tesla Software to build and launch PPP.BANK, a free and privacy-secured portal to help small businesses across the country navigate the complex loan forgiveness application process that followed the US’ Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The website earned Tesla Software and Citizens Bank of Edmond a place among the finalists for Best Fintech Partnership in this year’s upcoming Finovate Awards.
For those institutions that approached the unique circumstances of the past eight months with a can-do attitude, plug-and-play financial technology has demonstrated its enabling power beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Sanjib Kalita, editor in chief of Money20/20, who’s been with the payments conference from the beginning, in 2012, says technology – particularly that supplied by third parties and in partnership arrangements – will be a defining theme of banking in America in the next few years.
“In the early days of Money20/20, fintechs were saying to banks ‘we’re going to eat your lunch’. A couple of years later, it was ‘can we have lunch with you?’. That’s the evolution that’s happened in the market,” he says.
Among the three strata of US banks, he believes each currently has a different view of how important and cosy that relationship with fintech should be.
“You’ve got the big global banks – the JPMorgan Chases and the Citis – that are already focussed on innovation. They have been taking it seriously for a while – maybe not moving as fast as we’d like, but I think new challenger banks like Chime and Varo could be an impetus to accelerate what they’re doing.
“Then you’ve got the next group, the mid-size, regional banks, which might have tech neighbours, like the merchant acquirer First Data, that can help them accelerate, because these banks might not have the resources of larger institutions. And then you have the small consumer banks. I think these are the ones that are going to be most changed. They don’t necessarily have hundreds of people looking at the customer experience, and this is where I think there is going to be a tremendous partnership opportunity.”
How to improve those customer experiences, especially as they relate to payments, will be explored during MoneyFest – 18 hours of virtual networking and scheduled events featuring a more diverse and geographically representative slice of the payments industry than has ever been achieved in a physical location.
“Money2020 has always sought to bring people across industries – companies large and small, regulators, investors – together to create a community, and we’re building that out even further with MoneyFest,” says Kalita. “I personally miss being able to shake hands and give people a big hug, but the upside is you don’t have to figure out if you have time to fly to Vegas or Amsterdam!”
The pandemic that took Money20/20 exclusively online for the first time in its history will, he believes, have a similarly dramatic affect on the payments industry.
“Especially with contactless payments, we’re seeing a lot more uptake of that in the US. Europe has been ahead of us in that respect, but the catchup is now happening,” he says. “And then there are those payment experiences that are not necessarily tied to a traditional bank account. I can foresee a lot of cross-pollination. Amazon Go, for example, that’s a payment type that’s still not mainstream, but it’s the kind of experimental experience that, post-COVID, I definitely see starting to gain more traction.”
