Guess who's back, back again...

One of the most important thing for being successful in anything from sports to learning a new skill: Consistency. Something I have been lacking a lot in this blog here. It has been more than two and a half months since I’ve published my last blog post. Last blog post in mid April and today is already beginning of July. So I have missed my own goal of one blog post per week pretty badly. That is something I cannot undo but aiming to become consistent again and live up to my self-set goal.

The reason for being so quiet? Many things from “being busy in life” to my honeymoon trip. And as so often missing the deadline once makes it a lot easier to do it again. And again. That’s why being consistent can be hard 😉  

But enough talking about consistency and my laziness: what has happened in the FinTech world in the time I have been quiet?

PSD2

And the answer is unsurprisingly: nothing much. Of course there have been (many) discussions going on and also just this week the EBA published their opinion on the commission’s proposals (Finextra article). But one thing still remains: uncertainty. And with every day more of uncertainty it feels like another missed opportunity for Open Banking.
If you are interested in the detailed development around the discussion of Regulary Technical Standards (RTS) of PSD2, then I highly recommend you to jump over to our figo PSD2 blog and have a look at our ‘change log’. Of course you will find an updated version very soon in our figo PSD2 blog.

ICO

Before joining figo, I was actually writing my Master Thesis about crowdfunding and was discussing the problems of crowdfunding campaigns. That was 2013. Turns out making crowdfunding more attractive was to make the funding process more complicated, funding goals higher and the projects more complicated 😉

Jokes besides: I have mixed feelings regarding this development. The ideas behind ICO and the concept of Blockchain and decentralisation are revolutionary and definitely super interesting for many. However, what is happening at the moment with ICO’s is neither normal nor beneficial for the industry. While we see more and more ICOs during the next days and weeks which will most likely break more funding records, this is a trend which cannot continue forever. Or to put it in a quote: “A founder can be smart, and an idea can be good, but raising $100mm+ at seed stage is brazen and dumb” (Preston Byrne on Twitter).

Whoever is interesting in this topic, I can recommend the Epicenter podcast edition with William Mougayar (Epicenter – in general a great podcast about Decentralized Technology). Additionally, I can also highly recommend William’s book “The Business Blockchain” , which is not specifically about ICO but Blockchain in general with a lot of interesting insights.

Bankathon

Perhaps not as impactful as PSD2 or ICOs, but on a personal note our Bankathon has kept me quite busy the last weeks as well. As you may know, Bankathon is a very own FinTech hackathon which we had recently organised for the fourth time in general and first time outside of Germany. The event in Vienna was quite a success and we started already preparing for our next event in September in Amsterdam – with friendly support of FinTech Holland. But even with this support organising these events is quite a lot of work and especially since we have many more ideas we want to implement to improve this community even more. That’s why we at figo are looking for someone to join us to put Bankathon onto the next level. If you are interested, please let me know. Preferably, we would hire someone who can also support us in PR (job ad), however, also other scenarios are possible. 

This was a short recap of the three big things I have missed covering during the last two and a half months. My next blog post will already be published in a couple of days, and I am hoping to become consistent again with this blog during the next weeks, months and years 🙂