About this keynote
Firstly, thank you to Albert, Ekow, and and Asiedua the Head of Corporate Affairs at Standard Chartered Bank for asking me to be their keynote speaker at their first ever Fintech Festival in Ghana where I spoke alongside his Honour Ken Ofori Atta, Ghana’s Minister of Finance, and to an audience dominated by fintech entrepreneurs from across Africa and representatives from the Ghanian government and other local organisations. During my keynote aptly titled the Future of Banking, Money, and Payments, I took them all on a literal mental roller coaster ride to show them the obvious and non-obvious future of the financial services industry.
Naturally, I started high level showing them the forces that are accelerating the rate of global disruption and then I went straight into opening their eyes to new business models and ideas by discussing the impact of crypto mining cars and cities, and by demonstrating how a simple Web 3.0 Smart Fridge could disrupt global banking, a section which later I was told was one of the highlights of the session.
Then, having chatted through industry’s current broken business model, the rise of Bank 4.0, and fintechs, I showed them how gaming companies such as Epic could leverage the DeFi (Decentralised Finance) trend to disrupt not just the industry’s incumbents but also Big Tech’s ambitions for the sector. I then moved onto the future of money and showed the audience why asking the right questions is crucial, how fiat currencies could be disrupted, and why when we discuss this particular topic talking about the future of money is the wrong conversation to have when really we should be talking about the future of value instead.
Finally, we swung round to payments and here again I showed them why they need to expand their thinking and explore things that make the uncomfortable such as being able to pay with moves, play, or time, as we’re seeing companies such as Ikea and Nike already embrace.
And, not quite done I then had a lengthy round table discussion with Standard Chartered’s CEO and leadership team where we dived into all manner of topics, from the future of their business model and their physical branches, all the way through to their investment methodologies and approach to ESG.
