This week is a departure from the norm for me as I report on the Finance Magnets’ London Summit. Held at The Brewery in The City of London, the focus of this B2B financial industry conference is FX, trading, investing and capital markets.
Daily Fintech Advisers were there as a media partner for this event that attracted 1,500 attendees. I was a judge for the Fintech Awards and had the pleasure of moderating the morning session of pitches for Fintech Spotlight.
In this session, six Fintechs were given 10 minutes each to present their go to market offerings and it was my job to introduce them, keep them on time and then handle the Q&A from the audience.
First up was Jean-Francoise Owcezezak, CEO of Geneva based FinGraphs. This is a retail proposition platform that provides visual and straightforward chart analysis for investors and traders. And the platform simplifies the process for its retail clientele who simply don’t have the time or technical skills to be able to analysis the data in the way an institutional user would.
FinGraphs closes the gap between institutional tools and the retail market and claims to enable users to be operational within an hour.
Next was London and New York based Duco, who were later voted “Best in Show” for the Fintech Awards. CEO Christian Nentwich explained how their tech platform enables investment firms to control complex data using self-service technology. “We are shaping the core of new efficient operations with our buy/sell side and service provider clients.”
In essence, the Duco platform enables non-technical users to apply complex logic to their data, without the need to call the IT guy!
I then introduced David Hall, CEO and cofounder of Tapaas. Based in Sydney, Tapaas provides a trading analytics platform as a service to brokers globally. This is used to provide real time data analytics for risk management, reconciliation, liquidity and client toxicity monitoring.
The old adage of you can’t manage what you can’t measure is more true in today’s electronic trading business than ever before. Tapaas addresses this market demand with a mobile visualization tool that runs on the iPad or iPhone so that Brokers can see in real time, and wherever they happen to be, what is going on with their customer’s trading behaviors.
The prize for the most animated pitch in my session must go to Matt Kirkham from Fintech brokerage Silicon Markets. Matt explained how their tech brings institutional level tools to retail traders (a common theme at this summit). A key feature was their use of machine learning and artificial intelligence tech on the platform.
The penultimate pitch was delivered by Mark Foulger and Aharon Haber of Israeli Fintech Tradair. European Sales Director, Mark kicked off by introducing the 60 people business that raised $15m at the start of the year with P/E firm Long Ridge Equity Partners. Aharon described their FX liquidity distribution platform that enables banks to integrate their positions and dynamically manage price distribution across market platforms.
Last, but certainly not least was Cappitech. Sales Director, Marc Salter explained how Israeli-based Cappitech offers a solution for the 1m firms who fall under the EMIR reporting requirements.
It is believed that as many as 75% of businesses, especially the smaller ones, are not meeting their reporting requirements and Cappitech solves this by providing an easy to use, Software as a Service platform that takes a client’s files, in any format and quality, and translate them to a compliant reporting format. For small firms it can be as short as 4 weeks to achieve a compliant position.
There were two further Fintech Spotlight sessions later in the day before the conference free to a close with an awards ceremony. The four awards for Fintechs went to;
Best of Show: Duco
Best Product for Traders: DriveWealth
Best Mobile Solution: Tradimo
Best Data Innovation: Acuity Trading